Primary School Students' Knowledge of Line Symmetry

Abstract

Symmetry as one of the key concepts has a significant place at almost every stage of education. Whether the concept of symmetry is undeveloped or wrongly developed, influences many learning experience such as the students' acquiring mathematical concepts or solving routine/nonroutine problem. The line symmetry is a base for this issue. Thus, students' experience about symmetry according to a line is important. In the current study, it is aimed at determining the elementary school 8th grade students' knowledge about line symmetry. For this purpose, an open ended test with 11 questions was given to 147 students attending to four different schools in Eskisehir. Consequently, it was revealed that the students were successful at determining the vertical and horizontal line symmetry of the given shape in the case that the shape is not intersected with the symmetry line; however, in all other cases they made several conceptual mistakes.