The investigation of the effects of the applications of mathematics course on middle school students' mathematical literacy and attitudes towards mathematics

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of the Applications of Mathematics Course on students' mathematical literacy and attitudes towards mathematics. For this purpose, pretest-posttest with control group quasi-experimental research design was utilized. Qualitative data were also included to support quantitative data. The study was conducted with 63 eight grade students in a public school in Ankara. The experimental group (EG) was taught by activities involving the applications of mathematics while the instruction in control group (CG) involved solving questions and exercises. Mathematical Literacy Test and Mathematics Attitudes Scale were administered to EG and CG students as pretest and posttest. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with students in the experimental group in order to examine the mathematical processes in depth. Quantitative data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics, dependent samples t-test and ANCOVA. Content analysis was used to analyze qualitative data. Results showed that there was a significant difference between EG and CG in terms of post-test scores obtained from the Mathematical Literacy Test in favor of the experimental group. Results of the Mathematics Attitudes Scale showed that students' attitudes towards mathematics were not significantly different in terms of the groups. The mathematical process in which students are most successful is "employing" and the process in which they are least successful is "interpretation." On the other hand, the process with the lowest response rate is "formulating." In addition, a statistically significant increase was observed for the experimental group in terms of each mathematical process performance score.