Effects of hands-on activity enriched instruction on students' achievement and attitudes towards science

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of hands-on activity enriched instruction on sixth grade students' achievement and attitudes toward science. In this study, Science Achievement Test and Science Attitude Scale were used to assess students' achievement on sense organs and students' attitudes toward science respectively. Two teachers with four classes and total of 140 sixth grade students were participated in this study. One class of each teacher was assigned as experimental group and treated with hands-on activity enriched instruction and other class was assigned as control group and treated with traditional instruction. The Science Achievement Test and the Science Attitude Scale were administered twice as pre-test and after three week treatment period as a post-test to both experimental and control groups to measure students' achievement and attitudes. Multivariate Analyses of Covariance (MANCOVA) results revealed that hands-on activity enriched instruction were more effective than traditional instruction. However, the statistical results failed to show a significant difference between the experimental and control groups' attitudes toward science.