Scale For Determınıng The Geometrıc Thınkıng Skılls Level Of Prımary School 4th Grade Students

Abstract

Both international and domestic exams show that Turkish students' success, especially in geometry, is low. In order to investigate the reason for this, geometry learning success scales were examined. It was seen that most of the scales used in the studies measuring geometric thinking skills in the literature were prepared for the second stage of primary education and the scales for the first stage of primary education were in the form of tests. In addition, questions formed with negative interrogative sentences such as "which of the following is not" or questions containing incorrect definitions such as "which one is correct?" in these scales are not appropriate for use in the first stage of primary education. Because asking students to find the correct definition among incorrect definitions when they have not yet fully learned the subject and when there are no definitions even in their books can be misleading, and making a random choice without knowing the correct answer can cause conceptual confusion. Moreover, since 2024, test exams have been abolished in the first stage of primary education, and only in the 4th grade, students' success is measured with open-ended questions in classical exams. Therefore, a geometry thinking skill level scale for the first stage of primary education should also be prepared with classical exams and open-ended questions. For this purpose, the scale developed to measure the geometric thinking skills of 4th grade primary school students was applied to 100 students in a state school and a private school in one of the western provinces of Turkey. In the reliability analysis conducted quantitatively with SPSS by scoring the open-ended questions in the responses given to the application results, the Cronbach alpha value was found to be 0.85 and the exploratory factor analysis Kaizer-Meyer-Olkin result was found to be 0.731. The scale developed to determine the geometric thinking levels of 4th grade primary school students, who were prepared according to the new primary school curriculum of the Ministry of National Education, will fill a huge gap for primary school teachers in terms of giving an idea about the geometric perception skills of their students and for researchers conducting academic research on geometry learning skills.