The effect of analogy-based teaching on students' achievement and students' views about analogies

The aim of this study is to determine the effect of the analogy-based teaching on students’ achievement and students’ views about analogies. This study was carried out with the primary school 6th class students. The students were requested to form their own analogies as a result of the study in which the student centered analogy technique was used.

As a result of this research, experiment and control group’s academic achievement posttest scores was found significant difference in favour of experiment group (t(106)=-8.621, p<.05). In the study, both experiment and control groups’ achievement test scores indicated significant difference in favour of posttest. In the literature, there are studies about the improvement of academic achievement in experiment groups which carried out analogy-based teaching (Şahin, Akbulut & Çepni, 2012: Daşdemir, 2006). When experiment and control groups were compared, it was found that analogy-based teaching is more effective for improving students’ academic achievements than conventional training approach. Correspondingly to this finding, similar results were found out also by some other researchers in literature (). In the light of the researches’ and this research’s findings, it can be thought that analogy-based teaching is effective in improving academic achievement.

According to the results of the study, students stated that learning with analogies has positive contributions. The vast majority of students expressed that they thought about using analogies in courses is a useful and effective method. It was observed that they had difficulty in forming their analogies. According to the results of the research, vast majority of students stated that they had difficulties in establishing the relationship between similar –likened. As a consequence, we could say that the student centered analogy technique is an effective technique in the concept learning process which ensures the active participation of the students in the class by establishing correlation between the daily knowledge and the scientific knowledge by means of revealing the pre-learning of the students.

These results agree with other studies in the literature where it is argued that analogies are beneficial in learning science (Akamca, 2008; Akar, 2007; Akyüz, 2007; Dilber, 2006; Kayhan, 2009; Radford, 1989; Sağırcı, 2002; Saygılı, 2008). Findings emerged in this study showed that creating analogies by students is helps them to understand science concepts. At the same time, this study is compatible with studies on the identification and rectification of misconceptions (Aykutlu & Şen, 2011; Aykutlu & Şen, 2012; Bilgin & Geban, 2001; Dilber, 2006; Kılıç, 2007).

Many researchers stated that an analogy which was prepared by students is more effective than prepared by teachers (Atav, Erdem, Yılmaz & Gücüm, 2004: Kaptan & Arslan, 2002: Yerrick , Doster, Nugent, Parke & Crawley , 2003).

The use of an analogy provides a learning experience in which the students were not required to expose their own alternative concepts. So teachers should encourage their students to make analogy. But in this process they should be very careful. To concrete abstract concepts and to have deep understanding of the activities analogy could be used together for other concepts in other studies.