DEVELOPING COMPUTATIONAL FLUENCY WITH THE HELP OF SCIENCE:

A TURKISH MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL GRADES STUDY

ABSTRACT

Students need to achieve automaticity in learning mathematics without sacrificing conceptual understanding of the algorithms that are essential in being successful in algebra and problem solving, as well as in science. This research investigated the relationship between science-contextualized problems and computational fluency by testing an instructional method that was implemented as a non-traditional drill exercise. The study employed a quantitative analysis of pre- and post-test scores of Turkish middle and high school students after two interventions. The questions addressed were: Do the science-contextualized drill practices (SCP) improve students’ computational fluency better than traditional drill practices (TP)? Is there any statistical significance between middle and high school students in terms of their benefit from SCP? This study showed that science-contextualized drill exercises produced higher gains for both middle and high school students’ computational fluencies than the traditional context-free drill exercises.