The effect of intelligence games on students' attitudes of solving mathematical problems and reflective thinking skills for problem solving

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of elective intelligence games course in government middle schools on mathematics problem solving attitudes and reflective thinking skills of 6th and 7th grade students. The study which was applied through quasi-experimental model with pre-test and post-test control group consisted of 68 public middle school students in Milas county in Muğla province, 34 of which were in the experimental group and the other 34 in the control group. In the research, the students of the experimental and control groups were taught mathematics in accordance with the Ministry of Education curriculum for five lessons per week for 29 weeks, while the elective intelligence games lessons were taught for the experimental group students for two lessons per week in addition to the mathemtaics lesson. The data of the study were collected by using "Math Problem Solving Attitude Scale" developed by Çanakçı and Özdemir (2011) and "Reflective Thinking Skill Scale for Problem Solving" developed by Kızılkaya and Aşkar (2009). The scales were applied to the students in the experimental and control groups as pre-test and post-test. The conformity of the data handled in the study to normal distribution was determined by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. In the experimental and control groups, t test was used to determine the difference between mathematics problem solving attitudes and reflective thinking skills for solving math problems, pre-test and post-test averages. In the study; It was observed that there was a significant increase in the reflective thinking skills of the experimental and control group students' attitude towards solving mathematics problem and reflective thinking skills, and this increase was higher in the experimental group students who were given elective intelligence games lesson than the control group students. According to this, it can be said that elective intelligence games course improves the attitudes of mathematics problem solving and reflective thinking skills for solving math problem. Keywords: Intelligence games, mathematics, problem solving, student, teacher