Study of mathematical model skills of middle school seniors with low socio-economic level

Today, the change in science and technology affects many areas of our lives as well as educational and educational situations. Although the needs of individuals and society change, the theories and approaches to learning and teaching also change. Therefore, it directly affects the individuals who are the focus of this change. Development in science and education; it is necessary to train individuals who can use different resources, develop problem solving skills and have high-level thinking skills. This requirement is also among the objectives of the mathematics curriculum. This goal is to train individuals who can produce solutions to real-life problems and transfer them to daily life and make them skills. One of the ways to develop these skills in the mathematics program is to use modeling activities in mathematics teaching. Modeling activities are open-ended problems that are not routine, without keywords and ready-made patterns to guide the student, and without a single correct answer and solution. It requires students to mathematicalize, describe and interpret real-life situations. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the thinking processes of middle school 8th graders with a low socio-economic level in modeling activities and to reveal the difficulties encountered in these processes, if any. The research was carried out at a state secondary school in the village of the central district of a large province in southeastern Anatolia and is a qualitative study. Participants are seniors in the 4th grade of this school. After four weeks of preliminary work with the students, the four students in the focus group were determined using the criteria sampling method. The focus group was given the bean problem, which is the modeling activity, and asked to work and the whole process was recorded by video. After the video recordings were analyzed in writing, they were qualitatively analyzed together with the study papers of the students. The study results revealed that students with low socio-economic levels were able to test the accuracy of the models they developed by associating them with real life, where they made assumptions related to daily life throughout the process, and worked together to produce solutions on them. However, it has also been found that students have difficulties understanding the problem in the modeling process and especially in creating a generalized model.