Comparison of the students' performances starting grade 9 and finishing grade 9 on triangle problems presented in verbal and visual form

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the performance of 9th grade students in triangle problems with verbal and visual presentation and to examine the reasons for test failures. This study is important in terms of giving information to teachers and experts about the effect of problems with different presentation styles on students' performance, determining the situations that students have difficulty with and contributing to the organization of learning environments by explaining the mistakes they make. This research was carried out in Safranbolu district of Karabük province and Araç of Kastamonu province. İn the study, a total of 177 students who were about to graduate from 9th grade from 3 high schools selected randomly in the spring semester of the 2019-2020 academic year were studied. In the first two weeks of the fall semester of the 2021-2022 academic year, we worked with a total of 217 students who just started their 9th grade. The data of the study were obtained with two tests, namely the verbal triangle test and the visual triangle test, which were developed by the researcher, consisting of the same questions but with a different presentation style The questions in the tests were developed by the researcher and were prepared in accordance with the achievements of the triangle subject in the curriculum. For this purpose, a total of 20 problems were prepared for the first five acquisitions on triangle. There are 10 questions in each test. There are 4 different problems related to each acquisition Two of these 4 different problems were determined as easy and both of them were determined as hard problems. Easy and difficult problems, on the other hand, are problems with different presentation formats that contain the same numerical values. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were used in this study. Statistical analyzes were carried out with the quantitative data obtained from the tests. In order to support the quantitative data obtained from the tests with qualitative data and to conduct an in-depth analysis, semi-structured interviews with students about problem solutions were made and recorded. As a result of the research, it was concluded that the students were more successful in the visual test. In addition, it is seen that students who are about to finish 9th grade are more successful than students who have just started 9th grade. KEYWORDS: Problem Solving, Routine and Non-Routine Problems, Visual and Verbal Presentation, Representation Types, Triangle