İLKÖĞRETİM 6, 7 ve 8. SINIF ÖĞRENCİLERİNİN NOKTA, DOĞRU VE DÜZLEM KAVRAMLARINI ALGILAMA DÜZEYLERİ VE KAVRAM YANILGILARI

Misunderstanding of the basic concepts in geometry lesson, students will prevent from comprehend on the understanding of other geometry issues exactly. Geometry is one of the most important areas of mathematics science, and although its concepts have many visual aspects, these concepts are difficult to understand by the students and are considered as unpopular subjects (Öksüz, 2010). Daily objects and physical materials have an important role in learning the concepts of geometry and making experiments (NCTM, 1989, 48). Success of a student, who could not comprehend the basic concepts of geometry sufficiently, is low in understanding and solving the upper level subjects of geometry. This is among the factors that will reduce both the success in school and success of the individual in life (Alkan and Altun, 1998, Van Hiele, 1986). Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine the perceptions of 6th, 7th and 8th grade students on point, line, and plane concepts included in the second stage of the primary school curriculum. For this purpose, an answer is searched for the following problem. What are the thoughts, comprehension levels and misconceptions of 6th, 7th and 8th grade Primary school students on points, lines, planes and related concepts? Methodology: The Survey model is used in this study. For the methodology, the qualitative data collection method is used only, since it's suitable for the purpose. Population: The study group consists of primary schools in a medium-sized province of the Eastern Anatolia Region. The schools have been separated into four regions in their order of success according to the statistical data of the Ministry of Education, and two random primary schools have been selected in each region and total of 24 branches have been selected randomly from the 6th, 7th and 8th grades of these schools. Our samplings include 461 students, who have been studying in these schools. Data Collection Instrument: The data is collected by the Interview Protocol (IP). The pilot study of IP's is performed with 30 students studying in 8th grade of a primary school other than the samplings. Data Analysis: It has been asked for each student to answer the IP prepared for the purpose of the study in one hour of courses. Efforts have been made by the practitioner to prevent the students affecting each other during answering process. The IP forms taken from each student have been analyzed descriptively. Themes and sub themes of the data created separately by three of the experts considering their geometric descriptions and the resulting differences have been discussed and the common themes and sub themes in the study have been decided. The perception levels of 0, 1, 2 and 3 have been determined according to the Rubrics prepared by the researchers, and each level has been assigned as a theme, for the answers given to each of the questions by the students in this study. Results, Conclusion and Discussion: Concepts related to point, line and plane are the basic structures of the geometry subjects. Many of the concepts of the geometry course in elementary school are based on the relationships with these concepts. For this reason, teachers should pay attention on teaching of these concepts. The teaching processes should be prepared so that they will provide students to discover the concepts on their own, and the processes should be supported with concrete examples as far as possible, in teaching these concepts. For example, there are 70 students at the "0" perception level of the concept of point, 213 students at the same perception level for the concept of line, and 233 students at this perception level in the concept of plane. This result indicates that the majority of students participating in the study cannot define the concept of "point" correctly. And this shows that the concepts such as line, plane, angle, beam and so on that will be learned using the concept of the point will be affected negatively. This is in agreement with the result in the study by Öksüz (2010), Kiris (2008), Ministry of Education, TIMSS (2003), NCTM (1989) on "students experience difficulties related to the line and plane". A similar situation is observed in other levels of perceptions. The student misconceptions identified above are in parallel with result of "Turkish students have no skills to use basic properties of the geometric shapes", which is expressed in TIMMS 1999 third international mathematics and science study report (MOE, 2003). These concepts are confused with each other.