Effect of Teaching Problem Solving with Emphasis on Drawing Strategy upon word problems Solving Performance of Seventh Grade Students

The main purpose of present study was to investigate the effect of teaching problem solving using drawing strategy on word problem Solving performance of seventh grade students. This study was fundamental in terms of purpose and in terms of implementation a quasi-experimental method using pre-test and post-test design with the control group. The number of students in the experimental group and the control group was 207 and 216, respectively. To determine reliability, in a implementation, the questions of both tests were performed on a sample of 30 students, and Cronbach's alpha of the pre-test questions was 0.81 and the post-test questions was 0.77, which was desired. Results showed that students usually use non-formal strategies to solve word problems. However, after learning the drawing strategy, they prefer to use this strategy rather  than problem-solving strategies. They also draw various shapes to solve problems. This means that the shapes are not unique, and students draw the shape according to their personal and previous experiences. In addition, using parametric t-test, the difference between the problem-solving performance of the experimental and control group students in the pre-test and post-test was significant, meaning that the experimental group students performed better in solving word problems.