The effect of mathematics teaching through games on primary school students' achievement, motivation and anxiety

Since mathematics includes abstract subjects, it can be perceived as a difficult subject in our society. Thus, mathematics can become a subject of anxiety. It is important to make the lesson fun to reduce students' mathematics anxiety. Especially considering the developmental levels of primary school students, games cover a large area in their lives. Using games can be an effective method to concretize abstract topics and make the lesson fun. The aim of this research is to examine the effect of teaching mathematics through games on primary school students' mathematics achievement, motivation, and anxiety levels. A pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design was adopted in the research. So, two third grade classes in a primary school in Demirci district of Manisa province were selected as the experimental and control groups in the 2023-2024 academic year. While game teaching activities were implemented in the experimental group of 18, and traditional teaching method was used in the control group of 20 students. Motivation scale, anxiety scale and achievement test were used as data collection tools. Before the application, achievement test, motivation scale and mathematics anxiety scale were applied to both experimental and control groups as a pre-test. At the end of the application, a post-test was applied to the experimental and control groups and the results of the experimental and control groups were compared. The data obtained from the research were analyzed with SPSS 23.0 program. As a result of the findings obtained from the research, it was concluded that while teaching mathematics through games positively effects achievement, it has no effect on motivation and anxiety.