Mathematics teachers? views concerning model eliciting activities, developmental process and the activities themselves

Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are realistic and complicated problems comprising conceptual tools or models which engages students in mathematical thinking and in which the obtained solution can be used to communicate, to make it reasonable and to bring realistic cases to a solution (Thomas and Hart, 2010 citing from Lesh and Zawojewski, 2007). An implementation should provide the reality, model construction, self-assessment, construct documentation, model generalization, and effective prototype principle so that it can be a MEA (Lesh, Hoover, Hole, Kelly, and Post, 2000).The aim of this master thesis is to study the MEA designing processes of mathematics teachers and their opinions on these activities. The data of this study was collected through case study which is one of the qualitative research methods. MEA designing process was carried out in the workshop named Mathematics Workshop I: Model Eliciting Activities with 51 Mathematics teachers working in İzmir in June 20-24, 2011. Of these 51 Mathematics teachers, thesis study was performed with 17 teachers chosen through maximum diversity.The findings of the study were obtained from focus group interviews, the video records of the teachers? MEA designing processes, the group and individual interviews performed with the teachers. During the first focus group interview performed before the workshop, it was aimed to reveal the teachers? pre-knowledge about MEAs. Afterwards, teachers? two-day MEA designing processes and half-day MEA revision processes were videotaped. In the interviews made with the groups at the end of the designing process, the groups were asked to assess themselves in accordance with MEA designing principles. In the last focus group interview made with teachers at the end of the workshop, it was tried to disclose the teachers MEA implementation in their classes and their preferences to design MEA in their future classes or benefit from MEA currently present in the literature. Finally, after the volunteer mathematics teachers implemented MEAs, which they had designed, in their classes, individual interviews were performed with them.The MEAs in question were subjected to document analysis in order to find out the extent to which the teacher-design MEAs cover the principles. The designing process, the interviews made with the groups at the end of the designing process and the interviews after the school implementations were analyzed using content analysis depending on the theoretical frame. Correspondingly, content analysis was utilized in the assessment of focus group interviews performed with teachers.From the information obtained in the study, it follows that the teachers did not have any pre-knowledge about MEAs at the beginning of the study. Also, the teachers were determined to have attached importance on the presence of the reality principle at most and on the presence of effective prototype principle at least. It was concluded that the introductory article and the readiness questions were related to the problem situation. Besides, it was determined that almost all of the study groups started the designing process through finding out the real life situation and then tried to construct a model. In the first focus group interview before the workshop, the teachers with no information about MEAs tried to define MEAs making use of the names of the words they include. In the last focus group interview, almost all the teachers stated that they could benefit from MEAs in their classes and cited that they could both design MEA and utilize the existing MEAs.