Eğitim Kuram ve Uygulama Araştırmaları Dergisi

The
main purpose of primary school is to prepare individuals for life and upper
education. Efficient reasoning, critical thinking and problem solving are
important mental skills for both of the purposes to take place. In the
fulfillment of these skills, each of the lessons in the primary school
program has their own roles, among which the place of mathematics is more
than all. For a proper mathematics education, it is extremely important that
mathematical concepts are taught and learned fully and correctly throughout
the primary school. Mathematics is a cumulative discipline. Therefore, if
mathematics teaching cannot be established on a solid basis in the first
years of the individual's education, the individual cannot be expected to
succeed in this field in the future. Mathematics, which is a system in
itself, is composed of structures and relations, and it is an abstract
concept involving successive abstractions and generalization processes of
these structures and relations. It is known that mathematics is difficult for
students since abstract concepts are difficult to obtain. For this reason, the examination of teaching
methods for mathematics is a subject that should be prioritized in this age.
Children try to perceive the concepts of addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division at an early age. Parallel to the perception of
size, quantities and numbers; children's perception of these concepts also
improve. The concepts of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
in everyday life play an important role in this development. However,
learning these concepts which are based on a certain abstraction process
takes a long time and requires a certain maturity in terms of age. For this
reason, the teaching of these concepts has an important place in the
curriculum. Mathematical mistakes, one of the variables in mathematics
education, are a phenomenon encountered worldwide. Educators and psychologists
have long been interested in this issue. This
interest has resulted in the emergence of many theories about the formation
of mathematical mistakes. In our country, the teaching of four operations in
mathematics is started at the elementary school and four operations form the
basis of many subjects that students will encounter during their education
life. This issue affects student success in every level of mathematics
education from primary school to higher education. Therefore; students'
mistakes, difficulties and possible misconceptions should be identified and
removed, and the forms of instruction that hinder the learning of students
need to be investigated. Thus, this research aims to identify the mistakes
that students make regarding four operations in mathematics.