Pixel International Conferences

Early childhood where the child is full of curiosity and interest in the world and does not yet have negative attitudes towards the science, provides a perfect ground for the acquisition of scientific process skills. According to Ostlund (1998), scientific process skills are part of other disciplines and are centralized. Tehelen (1976) and Wellman (1978) point out that scientific process skills enhance readiness to school; Campbell (1972) and Almy (1966) indicated that scientific process skills support the mathematical success (Cited in Ostlund, 1998). Ayvacı (2010) stated that the acquisition of scientific process skills in pre-school period will contribute to the child's social-emotional development and contribute to the children being able to know themselves in all aspects, communicate effectively with others, become researchers, creative and peaceful individuals. The studies in literature, emphasizes the importance of developing children's scientific process skills.

Cartoons are one of the media's children's role models for social learning. In the research, cartoons and basic scientific process skills are discussed. The aim of the research is to identify the three most common TV cartoons in October 2016 according to the results of the rayting ratios and to examine the inclusion of Basic Scientific Process Skills in these cartoons. The discovery of how much space is included in Basic Scientific Process Skills in cartoons preferred in the work will serve as an informative guide for educators and families.

The research was realized by the content analysis method included in qualitative research methods. Visual materials such as movies and video can also be the subject of qualitative research (Büyüköztürk, Çakmak, Akgün, Karadeniz &  Demirel, 2012). Detection of cartoons to be investigated in the study was made according to the results of the total rating of October 2016. During the research, three cartoon films with the highest total rating were handled during October 2016.

40 sections from 3 cartoons, 120 sections in total were watched by researchers. The analysis of the basic scientific process skills in each episoed has been realized by the researchers with check list which preperad in the light of the studies done in the literature (Güler, 2005; Taştepe, 2012; Büyüktaşkapu, 2014), based on the opinions of the experts and the pilot watching. In October 2016, the three most frequently watched cartoons were identified as “Rafadan Tayfa”, “İstanbul Muhafızları” and “Keloğlan Masalları”. All cartoons are broadcast in the national channel TRT Children.

As a result of the obtained data, it was discussed how much the basic scientific process skills were included in the three cartoons, which skills were shown the most and whether it was sufficient for positive science attitudes in early childhood.

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