The Effect of 3D Virtual Learning Environment on Secondary School Third Grade Students’ Attitudes toward Mathematics

ABSTRACT

With this research, in Second Life environment which is a three dimensional online virtual world, it is aimed to reveal the effects of student attitudes toward mathematics courses and design activities which will enable the third grade students of secondary school (primary education seventh grade) to see the 3D objects in mathematics courses in a concrete way, access the information outside of the school and provide them with an education through games.

In order to achieve this aim, this research was carried out with 28 secondary school third grade students having their education in Istanbul province, Uskudar district, in Fatih Secondary School in 2014-2015 academic year. Research data was collected by Mathematics Attitude Scale which is prepared by Ministry of Education. The data collected in the research, analyzed with nonparametric statistical methods as the group number is less than 30. In order to compare the pretest and posttest total scores of the experiment group, Wilcoxon signed rank test, which is considered appropriate to be used in relational measuring, was used and quantity analysis of the research was carried out by “SPSS 21 for MacOS X” package program.  Wilcoxon signed rank test results related to whether the students’ pre-experimental and post-experimental attitudes towards mathematics have a significant difference or not, is shown on the table. The analysis result has shown that there is a significant difference between the students’pre-experiment and post-experiment scores, taken from Mathematics Attitude Scale (z=2.95, p<.05). When the mean rank and rank sums of the difference scores are taken into account, this difference is in favor of positive rank,namely in favor of post-test score. According to these results, it can be stated that Mathematics robot developed in Second Life environment has an important effect on students’ attitude towards mathematics.