Unveiling Strategies and Difficulties: Investigating Secondary School Students' Approaches to Area Measurement Problems

This study aims to explore the strategies that secondary school students employ and the difficulties they encounter when solving area measurement problems. The participants consist of 75 seventh and eighth-grade students from southeast Turkey. Data were obtained through a form comprising six open-ended problems, designed to uncover the “nature of justifications”. Analysis of the students' responses revealed 11 distinct strategies and 11 difficulties. The most frequently employed strategies for solving area problems were reasoning through drawing shapes and applying the area formula (axb). Students struggled the most with distinguishing changes in the area from changes in the perimeter. It was observed that the root of the difficulties experienced by the students was challenges in measuring length. Notably, when presented with contextual problems, students focused on the context and justified their solutions based on cultural factors. As such, it is recommended that the process should be designed while considering cultural factors (both facilitators and inhibitors) in teaching subjects such as area measurement, which are closely related to real life.