Ortaokul Öğrencilerinin İstatistiksel Grafikleri Okuma ve Yorumlama Düzeylerinin İncelenmesi

Abstract

It is emphasized that statistical literacy has an important place in our personal life to be a good consumer, citizen and employee. The ability to read and interpret statistical graphs is an important part of statistical literacy. Students must be able to read and interpret the information presented with the graphs encountering through different media such as newspapers and magazines. This study, carried out as a case study, examined the reading and interpreting graphs levels of five middle school students. This study was conducted during the spring semester of the 2017-2018 academic year in a public middle school located in the district of Sivas. The participants of the study consisted of five (4 girls, 1 boy) 7th-grade students. For the purpose of the study, the activities designed by the researchers were implemented to examine the students’ levels of graph reading and interpretation. After the activities were implemented, the individual interviews were conducted with five participating students to examine their graph reading and interpretation levels in more detail. The data sources for this study were students’ written activity sheets of including reading and interpreting graphs and activity-based individual interviews. The findings of the study revealed that the students interpreted the graphs, where they were asked to interpret the graphs through an open-ended question for each graph, by reading between data at three different levels as very low level, low level and medium level, but they could not read between data at a high level. On the other hand, the findings indicated that the students answered the structured questions accurately that they would answer by reading and comparing the data directly from the graph. To improve students' statistical literacy in teaching data analysis learning area, this study suggests that mathematics teachers should present similar activities included in this study, which students deal with interpreting and critically analyzing statistical information.