The effects of mathematics teaching through storytelling on second grade elementary school students' word problem solving skills ın relevant to addition and subtractıon

The aim of this research is to analyse efficiency on word problem solving skills relevant to addition-subtraction of students being in grade two and what students? views are about the process of mathematics teaching through storytelling.In the second term of 2010-2011 school years, the research which is made in Adana province, Karataş ve Yumurtalık districts, is a quasi-experimental study figured for ?pretest-posttest control grouped.? The research was performed on 50 students. An experiment and a control group was made to test the efficiency of the method of learning mathematics through storytelling comparing to that of the usual method. Experiment and control groups were made depending on principle of facility after the groups were matched considering demographic specialities and their pretest scores of word problem test. The research was performed by the researcher in the experiment group during the experiment process and it lasted for six weeks.?Word Problem Test? was performed to students in experiment and control groups as a pretest at the beginning of the study and it was performed as a posttest at the end of the study. At the end of the study, ?Remarks Form About Mathematics Teaching Through Storytelling? was performed on students in the experiment group and their opinions were taken about this method and application. Students? thoughts, behaviours, problem solving skills and perceptions towards the process were collected in ?Researcher Journal? by the researcher during the research process and they were analysed with the interview data.To determine if or not there were significant differences in statistical way between the groups, Mann Whitney U test, being one of the non-parametric test, was applied to the data collected from Word Problem Test-Processing Part as normalness hypothesis wasn?t performed and covariance analysis (ANCOVA) was used on the data collected from Word Problem Test-Problem Part. The data collected from Word Problem Test ? Explanation Part was analysed qualitatively for experiment and control groups and the findings were tabulated and presented separately.At the end of the research, it was seen that no significant difference between the groups for developing the success emerged. When the Word Problem Test- Explanation Part was analysed, it was specified that students in the experiment group make better and more meaningful explanations about solving problems than students in the control group.The data obtained from ?Remarks Form about Mathematics Teaching through Storytelling? was analysed with descriptive analysis methods in qualitative researches. According to the findings collected from interview form, students in the experiment group stated that they found story activities interesting, they enjoyed this activity, mathematics lessons passed more fun and better, their solving problems skills developed and they wanted to go on the lessons with this method. When the data from the researcher journal got analysed, it showed parallelism with the interview findings broadly. However, restraint symptoms were observed in a few students in the forthcoming weeks. Although students of the experiment group presented opinions in the interview form that they made a progress about their problem solving skills, it was observed that they had difficulties in problem solving exercises during the experiment.