INVESTIGATION OF MATHEMATICS TEACHERS’ VIEWS ABOUT IMPROVING PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS

Year 2016, Volume: 4 , 471 - 481, 01.09.2016

Cemalettin Yıldız

Abstract

Since problem solving skills play
a central role in middle and secondary school mathematics curricula, this made mathematics
educators give importance to this subject. Improving problem solving skills of
students is one of the primary aims of education so it is very important to
make students gain problem solving skills. Thus, the aim of this research is to
investigate views of middle and secondary school mathematics teachers related
to improvement of students’ problem solving skills. Qualitative research method
was used in this study. The research was done on fall term of 2015-2016
academic year. The study was conducted with 115 mathematics teachers (60 middle
school and 55 secondary school) working at state schools. Data were gathered by
a form consisted of open ended questions and analyzed by descriptive and
content analysis techniques. At the end of the research, it is found that
teachers had information about the importance of problem solving skills
improvement in mathematics education. Also, it is determined that participants
thought teachers should have a central role in improving problem solving skills
and students should strive in problem solutions. In addition, it was found that
teachers believed that mathematics and other lessons improved problem solving
skills and improvement in problem solving skills had a positive effect on the
achievement in mathematics and other lessons. Lastly, teachers thought that
students whose problem solving skills had improved were more successful than
the other students and had higher self-confidence than others. They also stated
that since it had an impact on improvement in problem solving skills, it should
be given importance to level of students when the textbooks were prepared.

Keywords

Problem solving skills, mathematics education, middle school mathematics teacher, secondary school mathematics teacher

References

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