Opinions of primary teachers regarding virtual manipulatives

The general assumption is that virtual manipulatives help to improve the primary school students' abilities to understand the concepts better, comment on them and to use them in the process of solving problems. If virtual manipulatives are to be effective on match teaching, teachers must choose the appropriate virtual manipulatives and must have the ability of using them effectively. In this respect, the aim of this research is to examine the opinions of primary teachers on virtual manipulatives. The research is scanning model type and has a descriptive property. A survey was made to detect the classroom teachers' opinions on virtual manipulatives, their awareness about them, and their situation of using them. To support the findings obtained by descriptive analyses, interviews were made with three of the teachers who mentioned using virtual manipulatives and the results were reported. SPSS (18.0) statistics programme was used for analyzing the research data. By using the mentioned programme, percentages were obtained with frequency distribution; chi-square analysis was used to measure the relation between the variables. The findings revealed that from the 278 teachers that attended the research, 254 of them weren't using virtual manipulatives while teaching mathematics. Comments were made through the findings that were reached as the result of semi-structured interview form that was used to get the teachers' opinions. KEYWORDS: Virtual manipulatives, math education, teacher's opinion.