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Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 1 (2009) 1802–1804

World Conference on Educational Sciences 2009

Effects of computer use on students’ mathematics achievement in

Turkey

øbrahim DEMøRa, Serpil KILIÇa,b,*

a
Department of Statistics, Institute of Science, Assistant Professor, østanbul, Turkey
b
Department of Statistics, Institute of Science, Research Assistant, østanbul, Turkey

Received October 25, 2008; revised December 16, 2008; accepted January 4, 2009

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of computer using on mathematics achievement. The sample was prepared
from students who participated in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Turkey. These data consisted of
4816 15 year-old Turkish students in 159 schools. Analysis was done with two-level hierarchical linear model. These clustered
data set with a two level hierarchical structure examined students nested within different schools. Two-level model was used to
estimate coefficients and modeled differences across schools. Results from this study indicate that some of the school type, male
students and computer use at home variables had positive effects and there is no significant role in students’ mathematical
performance between the First generation and Non-native students.
© 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.

Keywords: Hierarchical linear model; Computer use; Mathematics achievement; PISA.

1. Introduction

Turkish Education System has democratic, modern, secular and co-education characteristics. The aims of the
system are to increase prosperity and welfare of Turkish citizens and society, to support and accelerate economic,
social, cultural development in accordance with national unity and integrity. Turkey’s centralized education system
began using computers began more twenty years ago. Computers with built-in graphing software for enhancing
mathematics teaching and learning are now over ten years old.

Serpil Kılıç. Tel.: +90-212-383-4424; fax: +90-212-383-4415.

E-mail address: serkilic@yildiz.edu.tr.

1877-0428 © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.

doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2009.01.319
 İbrahim DEMİR, et al. / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 1 (2009) 1802–1804 1803

Education is a complex process and many factors directly or indirectly affect school outcomes. However, most of
the previous studies took into account the multiple factors of mathematical achievement, in addition, to explain what
purpose of using computers at home might help students’ achievement. But it is difficult to properly define the
major factors influencing achievement.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of computer using on mathematics achievement. The sample
was prepared from students who participated in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Turkey.
The PISA is a collaborative effort, involving 30 OECD countries and 11 partner countries, to measure how well 15-
year-old students are prepared to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge societies. These data consisted of 4816
15 year-old Turkish students in 159 schools. Analysis was done with two-level hierarchical linear model. These
clustered data set with a two level hierarchical structure examined students nested within different schools. Two-
level model was used to estimate coefficients and modeled differences across schools. This kind of study has not
been made in Turkey using PISA dataset. But we show that there are many studies about educational achievement
using multilevel regression analysis in international review. It is given examples Wittwer’s (2008) and Chow’s
(2007) studies. Wittwer et. al. (2008) analyzed the effects of using computers at home on students’ performance at
school. The sample consisted of German students who participated in PISA in 2003; result from this study showed
that students’ access to a computer was not linked with their performance in mathematics. Chow et. al. (2007)
examined whether strategies of memorization, transfer through elaboration and metacognition accounted for
reading, science and mathematics achievement across 34 countries.158848 fifteen-year-olds completed a reading
literacy test and a questionnaire. Of these students, 88401 completed a science test and 88590 completed a
mathematics test. It was analyzed the data using multilevel regressions and modeled differences across countries and
across schools. Students who reported using memorization strategies often scored lower in all subjects. Transfer
through elaboration wasn’t significantly linked to any achievement scores.
In this study, dependent variable is mathematics achievement and independent variables of level-1 are gender,
immigrant background, computer at home and cultural possessions. School level (level-2) variables consist of
school type and quality of schools’ educational resources. Data was analyzed using SPSS 15.0 and HLM 6.04 after
selecting the variables that is related to the mathematics achievement and erasing missing values from dataset. Also,
students’ socio economic status, their gender, computer facilities at home and quality of schools’ educational
resources were significantly associated with their performance in mathematics.
Descriptive statistics of using variables in this study are found in Table 1 and Table 2.

Table 1. Frequencies of the categorical predictors of school performance

Independent Measures In %
Gender
Male 56,9
Female 43,1
Immigration Background
Native students 98,6
First generation students 0,6
Non-native students 0,8
School Type
Police Colleges 7,0
Vocational High Schools 13,0
Anatolian Vocational High Schools 15,0
Science High Schools 1,3
Anatolian High Schools 4,2
1804 İbrahim DEMİR, et al. / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 1 (2009) 1802–1804

Primary Schools 2,4

Private High Schools 3,3
General High Schools 60,0

Table 2 Means and standard deviations of the continuous predictors of school performance

Independent measures Mean sd

Computer Facilities at Home -1.20 0.86
Cultural Possessions -0.10 0.94
Quality of Schools’ Educational Resources -1.33 0.95
Economic, social and cultural status -0,96 1,08

We suggest that quality of schools’ educational must be increased for better mathematics achievement. To do that
school management may increase the number of library materials, audio-visual resources and computers. Many of
schools in Turkey haven’t any computer laboratory, so government should make an investment in these school types
and give a course to teacher. Because the new understandings required of teachers include not only technical skills
but an understanding of the relevance of the various features and information provided by the software to their own
instructional and curricular priorities, as well as pedagogical strategies for using the software in the context of other
constraints, such as time limitations and prerequisite student skills.
The findings are suggestive of ways in which performance in mathematics should be enhanced through the use of
computers. We thought that this study could be resource for further national and international researches.

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