Investigation of student errors in solution of contextual problems and suggestions for solution

The most important of the human competencies required by the changing world is to transform the existing information depending on the changing environment and conditions, to make this information used and useful. For this reason, it is extremely important to use math effectively. One of the important indicators of using mathematics effectively is to find solutions to the problems encountered in daily life. Hence, instead of giving students only mathematical processing skills, it is extremely important to raise individuals who understand, transform and find a suitable solution to the problem encountered. Based on this assumption, the purpose of this study is to examine students' mistakes in solving contextual problems that act as a bridge between daily life and mathematics. The study was carried out in two stages. Firstly, the mistakes made by the students with the contextual problems pretest were analyzed with the Newman Error Analysis Method. 10-week in class problem-solving teaching schedule was planned by determining the difficulties of the students based on the results obtained from this analysis. The aims of in-class problem solving teaching are to examine the difficulties that students have in contextual problems in more detail in the process and to observe how they transfer the daily life context to the problems. Student worksheets and transcripts of in-class video recordings were analyzed with descriptive analysis method. This qualitative research uses case study research design, and the participants are 7th and 8th grade students. At the end of the research, interviews were conducted with the students, and the data obtained from the audio recordings were subjected to content analysis. As a result of the research, it was observed that the students did made more mistakes in the stage of understanding and transforming, especially the difficulty in choosing the relevant information at the stage of understanding, ignoring the context at the conversion stage and not being able to transform the problem into the required mathematical form by taking the context information into account. The facilitating or compelling effect of daily life information on the problems was tried to be determined through each contextual problem. At the last stage of the research, various suggestions were made for the teaching practices and researchers.