Investigating skills problem solving strategies of middle school students

The primary purpose of this research is to investigate the middle school students' skills of using problem solving strategies. For this purpose, 15 mathematics problems were gathered by ransacking the internet, text books and related studies. The problem set was prepared by the researcher in a way that each problem can be solved using at least two different strategies. In 2015-2016 academic year, 24 seventh grade students took part in this study and the descriptive research design was utilized to examine the data collected from students' written works and decide the problem solving strategies that students used to solve the problems. Since the research data meet the parametric assumptions, independent samples t- test was used for statistical analysis. Based on convenience sampling method 12 high achievers (HA) and 12 normal achievers (NA) in mathematics, total 24 seventh grade students were selected. A year before in a private school, those students were identified and classified as HA and NA in mathematics according to their achievement scores on the placement test designed for 6th graders from middle schools in Antalya. The high achievers differed from the other group by having extra mathematics lessons in their course schedules. Those lessons were not instructed by the researcher or being related to the research. it is known that with the help of these extra hours, high achiever students have had the opportunity to work with different kinds of problems. Thus, HA were expected to have better scores at problem solving strategies. Results showed that "writing a mathematical sentence/an equation" was the most preferred strategy in both groups while "Drawing a diagram" was the least preferred one in HA. It can be also concluded that there was a significant difference between the groups' problem solving skills, naturally in favor of the high achievers. However, there was no significant difference between the groups' problem solving strategies. That even the high achievers lack employment of different strategies could mean two things: first, the idea that "students who have a high level of problem solving skills also have a high level of problem solving strategies" is a common misconception; and, second, there is not enough emphasis on teaching problem solving strategies in the middle schools. Keywords: Problem Solving Strategies, Problem Solving, High Achievers in Mathematics, Mathematics Education