COMPARISON OF BLENDED LEARNING AND DIRECT INSTRUCTION APPROACHES: ESSAY WRITING SAMPLE

In the studies of teaching writing, essay is considered to be one of the genres which can be commonly used as it develops thinking skills in addition to its topic variety and feature of narration. In this research, the purpose was to compare blended learning and direct instruction approaches in essay writing skills of students. This research which was conducted on 8th grade students from a primary education school in the center of Konya in 2014-2015 academic year was designed in accordance with pretest ? posttest control group experimental model, which is one of the experimental research models. Each of experimental and control groups in the research consisted of 21 students. The data were collected using “Essay Writing Evaluation Form” developed by the researcher. Applications were performed for 10 weeks through activities prepared according to blended learning approach in the experimental group and activities prepared according to direct instruction approach in the control group. Based upon the findings of the research, it was concluded that the activities which were prepared by using blended learning approach developed essay writing skills of the students further.