The Determination of Elementary School Students' Successes in Choosing an Operation and the Strategies They Used While Solving Real-World Problems

Problem solving takes place not only in mathematics classes but also in real-world. For this reason, a problem and the structure of problem solving, and the enhancing of success in problem solving is a subject which has been studied by any educators. In this direction, the aim of this study is that the strategy used by students in Turkey when solving oral problems and their achievements of choosing operations when solving oral problems has been researched. In the research, the students have been asked three types of questions made up groups of 5. In the first category, S-problems (standard problems not requiring to determine any strategy but can be easily solved with only the applications of arithmetical operations), in the second category, AS-SA problems (problems that can be solved with the key word of additive operation despite to its being a subtractive operation, and containing the key word of subtractive operation despite to its being an additive operation), and in the third category P-problems (problematic problem) take place. It is seen that students did not have so much difficulty in S-problems, mistakes were made in determining operations for problem solving because of memorizing certain essential concepts, and the succession rate of students is very low in P-problems. The reasons of these mistakes as a summary are given below: $\cdot$ Because of memorizing some certain key concepts about operations mistakes have been done in choosing operations. $\cdot$ Not giving place to problems which has no solution and with incomplete information in mathematics. $\cdot$ Thinking of students that every problem has a solution since they don't encounter every type of problems in mathematics classes and course books.