Investigating the role of representations on the problem solving performance of seventh grade students in solving word proportional problems

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the role of representations in the problem solving performance of seventh grade students in solving word problems including proportional reasoning. The statistical population of this study included 8425 seventh grade students and the sample size was 269 people who were selected by convenience sampling method. The research was conducted by a mixed method. Data were collected through two tests taken from Lobato (2010), which were exactly the same in both tests; With the difference that in the second test, next to each task, visual or verbal representation was used. The content and face validity of the questions of both tests were confirmed by experts. To check the reliability, the halving method was used. Guttman coefficient was 0.913 in questions without representation and 0.840 in questions without representation, which has good reliability. Students' performance in solving proportional verbal problems in the second and third grade comprehension was examined and the results showed that most students comparatively multiply values and understand the effect of changing a value on the measured ratio. Also, the data were analyzed using paired t-test. Therefore, the desired effect of using representations in responding to these tasks was confirmed.