Investigating the Change in Mathematical Modeling Competencies of Middle School Students During the Educational Process Designed with Mathematical Modeling Activities

This study aims to determine how the teaching process designed with mathematical modeling activities affects the mathematical modeling competencies of seventh grade middle school students. The embedded design, one of the mixed methods research designs, was adopted. The embedded design was adopted, one of the mixed methods research designs. The research participants consisted of 27 students studying at the seventh grade level of a middle school. During the 10-week implementation process, an opinion form consisting of open-ended questions and nine mathematical modeling activities developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools. Three of these activities were used for the pretest and posttest, and the remaining six were used in the implementation process. When analyzing quantitative data, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used. In the analysis of qualitative data, descriptive analysis was used. According to the results, during the implementation process, students showed the most improvement in understanding the problem and studying mathematically. In contrast, they showed the slightest improvement in the interpretation and verification stages. It is thought that it is essential to constitute environments where students can establish relationships with mathematics and to design mathematical modeling problems in these environments to attract students’ attention as much as possible.