Page 46 - IO1-Report

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

performance of teachers cannot reduce the fraction of student who do not understand math. But
increase the level of students’ understanding. That is, as a result of excellent and admirable efforts of
teachers, students who understand math to some extent are included to those who understand math.

Refugee Students Turkish Students

Girls Boys Girls Boys
Yes 54% < 64% 79% ≈ 75%
Do you understand Somewhat 32% > 21% 17% ≈ 21%
math teacher?
No 12% ≈ 15% 4% ≈ 4%

Table – 29: Students’ understanding of math teacher.
(Note-1: The sign ≈ means that the difference is not statistically significant. Note-2: The sum of percentage
may not give 100 due to students who do not reply whether they like math or not.)

Table-30 suggest a solution to the question of what can be done to reduce the high rate of RS who do
not understand math teacher. It also highlights the importance and potential of ULM project. Table-30
shows the dependence between understanding math book and math teacher. The majority of RS who
do not understand math book cannot understand math teacher. For RS girls, 42% of those who do not
understand math book cannot understand math teacher. This rate is much higher for boys (53%). These
ratios decline with understanding of math book. Among RS girls who understand math book, the
percentage of those who understand math teacher is only 2%. For RS boys, it is only 1%.

Do you understand
math teacher?

Girls Boys
Yes S.w. No Yes S.w. No
Yes %77 %21 %2 %90 %9 %1
Do you understand Somewhat %31 %56 %13 %23 %63 %14
math book?
No %29 %29 %42 %20 %27 %53
Table – 30: The relationship between understanding of math book and teacher.

Thus, the contribution of ULM project in raising the fraction of students understanding math book may
have positive effect on understanding math teacher. At this stage, the attempt to identify the direction
of relationship between understanding math book and teacher is not needed. The positive dependence
between variables is enough to invest in math books to make them more easily understandable.

The natural consequence of refugee students’ lower understanding of math can easily be detected from
the math achievements. In this survey, four basic math questions are asked, and the fraction of correct
answers are reported in Table-31. For RS, there is an underachievement problem in math. The gap

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