IMPROVING THE HISTORICAL THINKING SKILLS BY USING REPRESENTATIVE PICTURES DURING SOCIAL STUDIES TEACHING

Some of the conducted researches show that visual materials are not sufficiently being used in social studies and history teaching. the expression of “invisibility of visuals” and the views regarding that “the text dominant studies limit the visual thoughts of the students” are quite obtrusive. on the other hand, the need for researches concerning the historical thinking skills of the students are being emphasized in some of the studies. at this point, taking advantage of the representative pictures to improve the historical thinking skills of the students during their social studies and history education makes perfect sense. application phase of this study has been carried out during the first semester of the academic year of 2009-2010 with 39 students of the 7th grade of cumhuriyet elementary schools which is a state school located in karadeniz ereğli district of zonguldak province. the application is limited with the “journey through turkish history” unit on the “culture and heritage” learning area of the social studies lesson of the 7th grades. in the performed action research, with the intent of solving the research problem; “document review”, “observation” and “interview” methods of qualitative research data collection are carried out. content analysis is used in this qualitative study which is figured as an action research. research data revealed that the historical thinking skills can be improved in the research group by using representative pictures. it is determined that using representative pictures has a positive effect on the students for them to learn the current course subject, to increase their interest and attendance in the lesson and to improve their skills such as creative thinking.