The Effect of Using Cartoons on Primary School Students’ Academic Achievement in Social Studies Courses in Turkey: A Meta Analysis Study

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of using cartoons on primary school students’ academic achievement in social studies courses in Turkey. We preferred to conduct meta-analysis instead of traditional literature review. In accordance with the purpose of the study, we analyzed experimental research such as articles, dissertations, and papers which were obtained from Web of Science, ERIC, Scopus, Proquest, Ebscohost, Google Scholar, The Turkish Council of Higher Education Thesis Center, and Dergipark databases. We used [“cartoon” OR “comic” OR “caricature” AND “social studies”] search code in order to reach convenient publications. As a result of the literature review by using search code, 25 publications that were conducted as experimental studies between 2006 and 2020, were listed. 9 publications were eliminated since they had non-parametric values in normality tests and have no standard deviation values of control and experimental group posttests. Moreover, publications that have no achievement test were eliminated as well. Finally, 16 studies were included. We used R software to analyze the data. Cohen’s d, Hedge’s g values, and sampling variances of all publications were calculated. Heterogeneity and publication bias of studies were also checked before proceeding to the main analysis. The random-effects model was performed to calculate the overall effect size. As a result of the analysis, a large effect size was found. In other words, using cartoons has a large effect on primary school students’ academic achievement in social studies courses in Turkey.