Page 41 - IO1-Report

KA201 - Strategic Partnerships for School Education
The Universal Language of Mathematics (2018-1-TR01-KA201-059704)

Against the general wisdom, blue is not a masculine color. In fact, blue is a unisex color among Turkish
student at ages between 10-15. Therefore, regardless of their sex, RS and Turkish students are
consolidated on the same color as their most favorite preference.
Like refugee girls and boys, red is one of most favorite colors for Turkish boys. But the popularity of red
among Turkish girls is very low (Table-19). Instead of red, Turkish girls grade purple one of the most
favorite colors and purple is not among the favorite colors of other students, namely refugee boys,
refugee girls and Turkish boys. The popularity of green is high among RS relative to Turkish students.

3.4.4. The Attitude of Refugee Students Towards Math Course

The ULM project aims to improve integration process of refugee students (RS) into education system
by using universal language of mathematics. Since math has its own language and its learning mainly
depends on learning by doing, it can be taught without intensive usage of national languages. RS, who
have been learning national language of host country’s education system, can learn doing math
simultaneously. Therefore, this survey also investigates the attitude of RS towards math.

Firstly, the popularity of math among refugee and Turkish students is explored and the results are
summarized in Table-20. The fraction of Turkish students who do not like math is very low (%7) and it
is same for girls and boys. The majority of Turkish students, especially girls, like math course. The
popularity of math is still high among RS but it is at lower levels relative to Turkish students. Different
than Turkish students, the percentage of RS girls who like math is lower than the percentage of RS
boys. Almost half of the RS girls cannot say that they like math course. The ratio of refugee boys who
dislike math is only 7% which is as low as the ratio of Turkish students. For RS girls, this ratio is two
times higher than RS boys, Turkish girls and Turkish boys.
Refugee Students Turkish Students
Girls Boys Girls Boys

Yes 52% < 71% 86% > 81%
Do you like
math course? Not sure 33% > 19% 7% < 12%
No 14% > 7% 7% ≈ 7%
Table – 20: Popularity of math course. (Note-1: The sum of percentage may not give 100
due to students who do not reply whether they like math or not.
Note-2: The sign ≈ means that the difference is not statistically significant.)

The popularity of math significantly changes with class level. As reported in Table-21, the popularity of
th
th
math among Turkish students declines through class. From 5 class to 8 class, the percentage of
Turkish girls who like math tragically reduces from 96% to 67%. For Turkish girls, the liking of math
turns into dislike through classes. A similar trend is observed for Turkish boys with a critic variation. As
class of boys increases, the percentage of Turkish boys who like math declines from 92% to 64% too.
But instead of turning into dislike, their liking of math becomes uncertain for the majority of Turkish
boys (Table-21).

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