Investigation of the effect of Geogebra based transformation geometry instruction on 7th grade students' achievement, beliefs and attitudes

By use of dynamic geometry software, teachers can experience students' exploration of properties of geometric objects, understanding of relations among them, investigation, examination, making assumptions, observation of geometric object in many types and making generalizations. Especially dynamic geometry software has been included into the education system and this lucrative development provided in mathematics courses will be inevitably in the cognitive domain as well as in the affective domain of the students. In this context, the effect of GeoGebra supported transformation geometry instruction on 7th grade students' achievement in transformation geometry, beliefs about the nature of mathematics and its' teaching, and attitudes toward geometry are examined. In this study, pre-test post-test control group quasi-experimental design was used. In the experiment group, the instruction was done with GeoGebra; and in the control group, it was done without GeoGebra. The study was conducted with 26 7th grade students enrolled in Hendekyanı Middle School in Bartın in 2015-2016 academic year. The data of the study was collected by transformation geometry achievement test, beliefs about the nature of mathematics questionnaire, beliefs about the teaching of mathematics questionnaire and attitudes toward geometry questionnaire. For the analysis of the data handled, Mann-Whitney U test was used. According to the results of the study, a significant difference was not found between the experiment group which learned transformation geometry with GeoGebra and the control group which learned transformation geometry without GeoGebra in terms of achievement in transformation geometry, beliefs about the nature of mathematics and its' teaching, and attitudes toward geometry. However, it was found that the achievement level of students in the experiment group was higher than the achievement level of students in the control group. Moreover, it was found that there was no increase of students' beliefs about the nature of mathematics; on the other hand there was an increase of students' beliefs about the teaching of mathematics and attitudes towards geometry in the experiment group.