The impact of the balance strategy on the achievement of second-grade students in yoga and evaluative thinking.

Abstract

The aim of this research is to identify the effectiveness of the Balance strategy in both: physics achievement among second-year intermediate students and the development of evaluative thinking.

To verify this, the researcher formulated the following two null hypotheses:
• There is no statistically significant difference at the (0.05) significance level between the mean scores of the experimental group students who studied using the Balance strategy and the mean scores of the control group students who were aware of normality on the achievement test.

• There is no statistically significant difference at the (5...) significance level between three students from the experimental group who practiced the Balance strategy and the mean scores of students from the control group who were unaware of normality on the evaluative thinking test.

To initiate the semi-controlled experimental study of two equivalent groups, the researcher selected (60) second-year intermediate students from the Al-Qadisiyah Education Directorate – Center, officially launching in the 2025-2026 academic year. The study included (30) students divided into (30) experimental students and (30) distinguished students. Two different criteria were recognized for their diversity: age in months, intelligence, prior physical knowledge, future-oriented thinking, and prior achievement. The results were determined using an independent samples t-test, and the differences were found to be statistically insignificant.

The experimental group studied chapters six, seven, eight, and nine of the fourth-grade science yoga textbook for eight weeks, with three sessions per week, using the Balanced Strategy. The control group had the same teacher and the same study environment. The researcher developed two research instruments: an achievement test consisting of 40 multiple-choice questions, and an evaluative thinking test consisting of 35 items distributed across five main skills. The validity and reliability of both instruments were verified. The achievement test achieved a validity agreement of 0.82, while the evaluative thinking test also achieved a validity agreement of 0.82. The two instruments were implemented after the experiment, and the data were analyzed using SPSS version 22 and Excel 2010. The following results were obtained: The students in the experimental group who used the strategic balance method outperformed the students in the control group on the achievement test for the subject of ice. The students in the experimental group also outperformed the control group on the evaluative reasoning test.