Review on the attitudes of high school students towards historical places

Abstract

With the aim to identify the attitudes of high school students towards historical places, this study was carried out with 551 high school students in the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades of Science, Anatolian, and Social Sciences high schools in Yüreğir, Sarıçam, and Seyhan (the central districts of Adana) who volunteered to participate. In the study, the Attitude Scale toward Historical Places developed by Akça Berk and Gültekin (2019) was used to identify the attitudes of high school students toward historical places. The students’ levels of "valuing historical places”, “curiosity towards/special interest in historical places”, “indifference to historical places”, and “awareness of historical places" were reviewed by considering variables such as gender, class, school type, parents' educational status, and the person who accompanied them during their visit to the museum. In the analysis of the resulting data, the Mann–Whitney U test was used for paired comparisons to examine the differences between the groups regarding variables, and the Kruskal–Wallis test was used to compare more than two groups. The results show that there is no difference in attitudes between male and female students towards historical places. In terms of school type, the attitudes of Anatolian High School students toward historical places are more negative than those of the students of Science and Social Sciences High Schools. In terms of school grade, the most positive attitude is observed in the 11th-grade students, whereas the most negative attitude is observed in the 9th-grade students. The educational status of parents does not make a difference in the attitudes of students toward historical places. The results show that students not visiting the museum accompanied by a teacher, family, or school have a more positive attitude than those visiting the museum accompanied by their teacher, family, or school.

Keywords

• tarihi mekân
• tutum
• ölçek
• lise türleri
• tarih eğitimi
• historical place
• attitude
• scale
• high school types
• history teaching.