Determining High School Students’ Mathematical Thinking Styles: Latent Class Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to adapt the Mathematical Thinking Style (MTS) scale to Turkish, and to examine mathematical thinking styles of students by gender. The MTS scale was developed by Rita Borromeo Ferri at Kassel University in the scope of her 2011/2012 project, “Mathematical Thinking Styles in School and Across Culture (MaTHSCu).” With this scale, it can be determined which integrated, visual/pictorial, and analytic/formal thinking styles are preferred by students. After examining the psychometric structure of the Turkish form of the scale, it has been shown that mathematical thinking styles can be determined by latent class analysis (LCA). The study was comprised of 336 participants studying in Grades 9 and 10 in Ankara. The construct validity of the scale was examined by factor analysis, and the adaptive scale was found to have the same structure as the original scale. As a result of the LCA, it has been determined that students can be divided into three homogeneous groups with high classification reliability in compliance with the theoretical structure. The study found that the students mostly have an integrated thinking style. Female students had a more analytic thinking style compared to boys, and male students had a more visual thinking style compared to girls. In addition, the findings show that the MTS scale is a valid and reliable measuring instrument for the Turkish language, and that the MTS of students can be determined using LCA with a high level of confidence. The determination of students’ mathematical thinking styles by LCA to be within the bounds of possibility constitutes the original contribution of this study to the literature.