The effect of teaching problem soloving strategy on affective domains and achievement level in 9th class mathematics course

The main aim of this research is to examine the effects of problem solvingstrategies on student?s affective domains and achievement. Accordingly, in the study,the effects of teaching problem solving strategy on student?s attitudes toMathematics, mathematical anxiety and to their academic self-concept in problemsolving have been investigated. It has also been shown in what measure the changeundergone in the affective domains of students influences their achievement level.The experimental group consisted of 32 9th grade students studying in twosecondary level education institutions, one being a college, the other being a normalhigh school, in the spring semester of 2005-2006 academic year in zmir. Theexperimental work was completed in 8 weeks time in months of April and May of2005-2006 academic year.In this research experimental design with pre and post-test groups were used.Teaching problem solving strategy was applied in the course of teaching problemsolving strategy by using the method of thinking aloud. The students in theexperimental group were taught by using variables, finding relations and by thestrategies of guessing and controlling,. During the teaching process it was worked on10 problems for each strategy. In the teaching of strategy a duration of one and halfhours were allowed to each student for one strategy. A work of 4.5 hours was donewith each student for three strategy.In this research the data collection methods were: a) Personal information form,b) The scales of attitudes towards Mathematics, c)The scale of anxiety towardsMathematics, d)The scale of self-concept towards problem solving, e) Achievementtest, f) The questions for the determination of strategies.The quantitative data were evaluated by applying t-test included in SPSS.The results have shown that using the teaching of problem solving strategy haseffects on student? attitudes scale towards Mathematics, their self-concept scalestowards problem and on students? achievement. On the other hand, using problemsolving strategy had no effect on students? scales of anxiety of Mathematics. Theincrease in their achievement shows the effect of teaching problem solving strategyon their achievement level.