The reflection of mathematical modeling activities on argumentation skills

In the mathematics learning-teaching process, it is necessary to provide an environment where students can easily express their thoughts and reasoning about the problem situation they encounter, and where students can see the deficiencies or gaps in their reasoning. (MEB, 2018). For this reason, model-eliciting activities that aim to provide students with the ability to explain and interpret problems related to real life, to create different solutions based on predictions, and to provide the ability to design models can be used in education (Lesh & Doerr, 2003). In the modeling process, students constantly create arguments and base their arguments on modeling processes (Tekin-Dede, 2019). In this process, it is expected that teaching environments will be created that enable the discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments created by the students, the establishment of qualified relations between the argument structures, the claims they put forward as expected and the development of counter claims that can refute these claims. Rarely giving place to model-eliciting activities that enable to establish a relationship with real life in mathematics lessons (Blum, 2002; Blum & Ferri, 2009; Frejd, 2012) and for a long period of time, students listen to their teacher and only do what is asked of them, which prevents students from developing the ability to come up with ideas on their own (Yu & Chang, 2009). For this reason, it is thought that it is necessary to evaluate the argumentation environments in which model-eliciting activities are used and students can produce ideas. The aim of this study is to examine the change of argumentation skills in learning environments where model-eliciting activities are applied. This study was conducted with the qualitative research design and teaching experiment method was used. The research was conducted with 8th grade students. During the implementation process, 5 model-eliciting activities in the literature were used. The rubric developed by Cho and Jonassen (2002) was used to determine the quality levels of the argumentation process. When the data were analyzed, a linear increase in the quality of the argumentation components was not observed. Therefore, it can be concluded that argumentation skills are affected by the context of model-eliciting activity, students' mathematical knowledge and ability to use it, and experience.