Investigation of the relationship between science high school students' geometry achievement and Van Hiele geometry thinking levels

In this study, it was aimed to determine the relationship between Science High School students' success in geometry course and Van Hiele geometric thinking levels according to the results of geometry achievement test and Van Hiele geometric level test. The survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods, was used in the study. The study group consists of 244 students studying in three Science High Schools affiliated to the Ministry of Education in the city center of Diyarbakır in the fall semester of the 2020-2021 academic year, selected by the purposeful sampling method. In order to collect the data in the research, 25 questions of the Van Hiele geometric thinking test suitable for the level of the students and the geometry achievement test of 25 questions developed by the researcher were used. SPSS package program was used for the analysis of the obtained data. In the analysis of the data, descriptive statistics were calculated and the relationship between the scores of the students in the Van Hiele geometric thinking test and the geometry achievement test was examined by Pearson correlation. In addition, one-factor analysis of variance (One-Way Anova) technique was used to determine whether there was a significant difference between schools according to Van Hiele geometric thinking test results and geometry achievement test results. The results obtained from the research are as follows: The majority of the students (63.6%) who participated in the research were found to be at Level 3 (Informal Inference) Van Hiele geometric thinking level and above. A moderate correlation was found between the scores the students got from both tests. In the results obtained from the Van Hiele geometric thinking test and the geometry achievement test, a significant difference was found between the Science High School, which received the highest score in the province, and the other two Science High Schools, according to the high school entrance exam scores. According to the geometry achievement test, there was a statistically significant difference between Van Hiele geometric thinking levels. Keywords: Van Hiele, Geometric Thinking, Geometry achievement, Science high school students