Investigating 11th grade students' understanding of the concept of function by using problem posing

Problem posing activities have many educational capacities.The purpose of this study is to investigate the understanding of the 11th grade students of the concept of function by using problem posing. The research method is descriptive-survey, and the statistical population includes all students of the 11th grade of District 1 of Tehran. From this population, 278 people were selected as sample by two-stage cluster random sampling method. In order to investigating the performance of students in problem-solving tasks, a researcher-made test was used. This test consisted of 3 tasks, whose formal and content validity was confirmed by a number of math professors and some math teachers with 11 years experience. The value of Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.79, which indicates the good reliability of the test. The results of the data showed that most of the problems proposed by the students were simple or similar to the textbook problems and the students showed low creativity in the problem posing. Their poor performance in responsing the test tasks clearly indicates that the constructions of the concept of function in the minds of most students are incomplete, and perhaps the most important factor can be considered their incorrect and procedural understanding of the concepts. Based on the obtained results, it can be said that the use of problem-solving tasks not only makes teachers aware of students' understanding of mathematical concepts and their misconceptions in various topics, but also the students themselves.