The Impact of an Authentic Intervention on Students’Proportional Reasoning Skills

Abstract—As a part of a long-term design-based research project, this study aimed to investigate the mean differences among the pre-, postand retention tests of seventh grade students regarding their proportional reasoning skills. The data of this paper were collected from 30 seventh-grade students enrolled in a public school in Ankara, Turkey in the first and second semester of 2017-2018 academic year. Participants of the study were engaged in a teaching experiment aimed to develop their meaningful understanding of ratio and proportion unit through authentic activities. The intervention prolonged 30 lesson hours and Proportional Reasoning Test was applied to the students at the beginning of the instruction as pre-test, at the end of the instruction as post-test, and 5 months later as retention test. A one-way repeated measures of ANOVA was conducted to compare scores on the Proportional Reasoning Achievement Test at Time 1 (pretest), Time 2 (posttest) and Time 3 (retention test). Findings revealed that there was a significant difference among proportional reasoning skills. More specifically, there was a statistically significant increase in Proportional Reasoning Achievement Test scores from Time 1 to Time 2 but the difference between Time 2 and Time 3 was not statistically significant. Findings revealed the significant effect of intervention on students’ proportional reasoning skills and retention of those skills. Based on the findings it could be deduced that designing authentic interventions could have an impact on enhancing and enduring students’ proportional reasoning skills.