The examination of secondary school students? mathematical word problem solving abilities that depend on proportional reasoning and that require actual answer

The main purpose of this research is to examine the secondary school students levels of problem solving which requires proportional reasoning ability and which seems like proportional reasoning problems but requires actual answers, solution strategies of the students in these problems and to examine the differences 6th, 7th and 8th grade students.This study is applied on 570 randomly selected students of grade six, seven and eight the in official primary schools of Ministry of National Education in Seyhan, Adana in 2008-2009 education year. A problem test including problems which requires proportional reasoning and actual answers is to be applied to students as a data collecting tool for the research. After students solve the problem test, 10 students from each grade (totally 30) are to be chosen to inquire how they make comments on the problem which require actual answer and their thoughts during solving this problems.Analysis taken from the data collecting tool has shown that the students are more succesful at proportional reasoning problems than actual answer problems. At the end of this study it has been observed that students have difficulties in making connection between mathematics and the situations in real life.Keywords: Problem Solving, Proportional Reasoning Problems, Real-World Problems