A research on determination of the comments of 8th grade students educated in rural areas on mathematical modelings

The aim of this study to reveal the opinion of 8th-grade students related to mathematical modelling in rural areas. The sample of study consists of 16 students educated in the 8th class of the Karalan Secondary School, a village school in the Mazıdağı district of Mardin province, in the fall semester of the 2019-2020 academic year. Mathematical modelling activities are applied to these students. In this research, the status of Qualitative study is used in this research. Research data consist of mathematical modelling activities, three heating and three modelling problems. After the mathematical modelling activities applied to the students, a structured conversation form dinter view form was applied and descriptive analysis was performed. As a result of analysis, the students expressed that mathematical modelling activities are very different from the problems which they meet in the classroom, these problems are related to daily life, the numbers of options are more, they are away from memorization, they are active, the teacher is guiding and they have some properties which could be explained by experiment. The students are declared that with the help of group work various ideas occurred, they could give and take ideas with each other, they could cooperate, they could increase the power of social communication and they could reach the result in less time. Students participating in our study declared that mathematical modelling activities will be useful on students' top-level thinking skills, creative thinking, increasing in logic and reasoning power, permanent learning and social communication. In this process, they also declared that there exist some difficulties such that excessive solutions, disagreement in the group, lack of familiarity with such problems, operational difficulties. Keywords: modeling, mathematical modeling, activities of mathematical modeling