Abstract:

The purpose of this study is to examine secondary school sixth grade students’ abilities of posing problems appropriate to the column graph. For this purpose, the students’ expressions that they wrote during problem posing activities were investigated according to certain criteria (whether the written expression is a problem, whether the Turkish grammer and story of expression have mistakes, whether the problem is appropriate to the given graph, at which trial the student is able to pose a problem, whether the student can complete the missing information in the given graph, and the student’s solution to his/her own problem). This study was conducted in qualitative research design using case study model of descriptive research methods. The sample group of the study consisted of 28 students, 15 girls and 13 boys in sixth grade attending a public secondary school located in the province of Bursa in the first semester of 2016 - 2017 academic year. In order to evaluate the students’ ability to pose problems based on the column graph, five problem posing activities that vary with respect to the given data in the column graph were prepared. To prepare these activities, the textbooks approppriate for the secondary school mathematics curriculum and expert opinions were utilized. In the analysis of the data, content analysis method was preferred. Each expression formed by the students in the problem posing activities was examined in terms of the pre-determined criteria. Though some grammer and story mistakes, it was seen that most of the students were able to pose problems approppriate to given graph and therefore their problem posing abilities were better than expected. Some of the problems that students posed were selected and presented with investigation results in the study.

Keywords: