An investigation of the effect of taking the topic of 7th grade integer numbers with technology-supported educational mathematics games on student success and permanence of information

The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of teaching the subject of integers in the seventh grade of middle school with a technology-supported educational game instead of the models covered in the current curriculum on student academic success, retention of knowledge and student opinions on the teaching process. A multi-stage mixed design, one of the mixed method research types, was used in the research. First, in the Qualitative-1 part of the research, in accordance with the exploratory sequential mixed design, qualitative data were obtained from ten mathematics teachers and ten seventh grade students with the interview scale form developed by the researcher in order to reveal whether there was such a deficiency in the current curriculum. The results obtained revealed that teachers and students could not fully use counting chips in modeling operations with integers and that there was inadequate modeling. In line with these results, a digital game that can teach the four operations skills with integers in an easier way was designed with the support of an expert software engineer in the Quantitative-1 part of the exploratory sequential mixed design. With the support of this designed digital game, the subject of "Operations with Integers", which is related to the "Numbers and Operations" learning area, was applied as an experimental process for six weeks to seventh-grade students in a medium-sized province of Turkey in the 2024-2025 academic year, in schools where the researcher worked and was easily accessible. In the second stage of the research in which the nested mixed design was adopted, a program for experimental study was prepared and implemented, and the effectiveness of the program was examined based on the obtained data. The experimental research was carried out with a total of 72 students, 36 of whom were in the experimental group and 36 of whom were in the control group, studying at the seventh grade level, from four branches selected with the cluster sampling method. During the experimental process, the students in the control group were taught the acquisitions of the subject of integers using only the methods in the curriculum, while the students in the experimental group were applied the digital educational mathematics game designed by the researcher for the acquisitions of the subject of integers in addition to the methods in the current curriculum. Integers Achievement Test was developed in order to carry out quantitative measurements in the experimental process. It was concluded that the item difficulty of the achievement test used in the research was at a medium level (p=.66), reliable (KR-20 reliability coefficient value .987) and had a good level of discrimination (r=.37). The analyses were carried out by considering the normal distribution of the obtained data and when the post-test scores of the experimental and control groups were compared, a significant difference was found in favor of the experimental group. The permanence test was applied eight weeks after the post-test applied upon completion of the teaching process and the long-term learning levels of the students were examined. As a result of the examination, it was found that the differences between the post-test and permanence tests of the experimental group were significant. In addition, it was concluded that the permanence test score averages of the students in the experimental group were higher than the post-test score averages. As a result of the study, it was concluded that teaching mathematics with a technology-supported educational game increased academic success and ensured permanence in learning. In the last part of the study, a structured interview form called the "Digital Game Interview Form" was developed and applied to the students in the experimental group to reveal their opinions about the digital game they played. When the results were analyzed, it was revealed that digital educational games increased academic success and ensured permanence in learning, making the education and training process more efficient.