Factors Affecting Turkish Students' Achievement in Mathematics

Download or read book Factors Affecting Turkish Students' Achievement in Mathematics written by Ibrahim Demir and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following past researches, student background, learning strategies, self-related cognitions in mathematics and school climate variables were important for achievement. The purpose of this study was to identify a number of factors that represent the relationship among sets of interrelated variables using principal component factor analysis and examine the contribution of each factor to the explanation of the variance in the students' mathematics score using multiple regression analysis. The sample was prepared from students who participated in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Turkey. These data consisted of 3765 15 year-old Turkish students in 158 schools. The results showed that four factors under study totally accounted for approximately 34 percent of the variance in mathematics achievement. All of the factors had statistically significant effects on the achievement. The findings are very important for Turkish education system because the fact that changing school climate and improving the learning strategies are much easier to achieve than changing background factors affecting students' performance. (Contains 6 tables.).