Investigation of proportional reasoning skills of 7th graders in terms of variables of success, attitude and gender: An example of Bolu city

The purpose of this study was two-fold; (1) to determine the relationships between success in and attitudes towards mathematics and proportional reasoning ability, (2) to investigate gender differences in proportional reasoning ability.The research data consists of 351 7 th grade students in the 8 primary schools in Bolu. All students answered questions in their regular classrooms toward the end of the 2007-2008 school year.The data of the study was collected by the use of proportional reasoning test which was developed by Akkuş and Duatepe Paksu (2006) and the mathematics attitude survey which was created by using items in PISA 2003 project.A series of analyses was conducted to analyze the data:a) Principal Compenent Analysis, b) Kappa Statistics, c) Pearson Correlation, d) MANOVA and d) Chi- Square method. The SPSS software was used for all the analyses described.The results of the study show that there is a high positive relationship between general success in maths and proportional reasoning skills both in male and female students. In terms of the relationship between interest in and enjoyment of mathematics and proportional reasoning skills, the relationship was found to be positive and at medium level for male students whereas it was positive but weak for female students. The relationship between instrumental motivation to learn mathematics and proportional reasoning skills was found to be positive at medium level for male students but it was not statistically significant for female students. The relationship between Mathematics anxiety and attitudes displaying anxiety and proportional reasoning skills was found to be negative and at medium level both in male and female students.The results of this study also indicates that gender has significant effect on success in qualitative and quantitive proportional reasoning problems. The female students were found to be more successful than their male counterparts in qualitative and quantitive proportional reasoning problems. Also, there is a statistically significant relationship between gender and the student competence level in proportional reasoning. When the number of students for each pre-determined competence levels were examined, it was observed that female students were generally on 1st, 2nd and 3rd levels whereas male students were mostly on level zero. In sum, results suggested that the proportional reasoning levels of female students were higher than those of the male students.Key words: Proportional Reasoning, Attitudes Towards Mathematics, Success in Maths, Proportional Reasoning Levels