Students' personalized "algebra stories": Problem-posing in the context of out-of-school interests

The purpose of this study is to develop the skills of secondary school seventh grade students posing personalized algebra story problems based on their out-of-school interests and to reveal how students' out-of-school interests can support the learning of algebra. In this research, qualitative research methods were adopted for data collection, analysis and interpretation. In this context, teaching experiment model was used. The implementations of the research were carried out with grade 7 students, who were attending school in Kardeşler Primary School located in the center of Eskişehir in 2017-2018 academic year. In this teaching experiment, classroom practices in a twenty hours period were fulfilled with 30 learners of a secondary level sixth grade in two phases in the form small groups and class discussions. For small group works, the whole class is divided into six groups composed of six heterogeneous students. Later, one of these groups was determined and named as the main group, and a total of three students were selected from this group as the focus of this study: a female student with a high level, a male student with medium level, and a male student with low level. In this study, video recordings of pre, during and final clinical interviews with focus learners, as well as the teaching sessions, student documents and student journals, and researcher journals were used as data sources. At the end of the research, it was observed that the students' skills of posing algebraic verbal problems were low in pre-interviews and improved notably in post-interviews as a result of the teaching experiment. Also, it was observed that if students consider their out-of-school interests while posing algebraic verbal problems they were more successful in problem posing, learned the mathematical concepts better, and increased their interest and motivation to learn mathematics and posing personalized algebra story problems based on their out-of-school interests supported the learning of algebra, significantly. Key Words: Problem posing, Learning algebra, Linear relationship, Personalization