The potential of teaching modelling problems in the national curriculum for changing students’ attitude towards mathematics

The National curriculum of Islamic Republic of Iran has been focused on promoting students’ modeling skills. In consideration of this emphasis, this study has investigated the attitudes towards mathematics and the views towards mathematical modeling problems of 244 students in grade 10. This research was conducted with a pre-test, followed by an educational intervention and a post-test. During the educational intervention, two groups of students with different instructional formats; the direct teaching method, which is teacher-centered, and the operative-strategic method, which is student-centered, attended 6 sessions of modeling problem-solving. In order to gather data for the study, a Likert scale and an open questionnaire were used. The results of this study showed that teaching modeling problems improved students’ attitudes towards mathematics in both groups. While most students had positive attitudes that expressed the modeling problems as interesting and applicable, other students had negative comments.