Learning Scale Factor: A Case Study with the Help of the 6th Grade Pupils in Konya/Turkey

An important aim of the social studies and geography courses in the primary and secondary school are to gain the ability of reading, analyzing, understanding maps and map concepts. Pupils in our education system learn map concepts in primary school between 4 (10 age) and 7 grade (13 age) in social studies courses firstly. There are many maps regarding as geographical and historical themes in social studies textbooks that is designed or developed by Turkish Ministry of Education. To analyze current situation and map use in social studies courses, a study been done with social study course teachers in earlier research. By this study we have concluded that children could not understand scale factor mostly. Beside on this result a study has been done by using an exercise attached in 6th grade social study textbook with 21 pupils, and an alternative exercise which designed by researchers instead of textbook, with 19 pupils. Before these exercises we applied pre-test to evaluate if pupils know scale factor generally or not, and after we applied these exercises. We compared these exercises and test, and we obtained some results related to why pupils could not understand scale factor easily. In this paper we are going to analyze results in terms of the guano) of exercise and teaching method.