Ongoing Research Projects
The goal of this Tübitak-1001 project is to assess the interests, self-efficacy, attitudes, and approaches of female high school students regarding their career choices in STEM and digital fields. The project aims to identify the factors that influence their career decisions and to address the negative perceptions held by their immediate social environment, particularly concerning technology and digital studies. Additionally, the project seeks to investigate and mitigate any reservations students may have. To achieve this, we will develop and implement a school-based intervention model designed to raise awareness and enhance digital literacy skills among students, teachers, and families, while also testing the model's effectiveness over time.
The aim of graduate education is to raise qualified researchers capable of conducting independent studies (Gardner, 2008). However, the limited statistical experience of students in social and educational sciences leads to high levels of statistics anxiety and difficulties in understanding and applying statistical tests (Pan and Tang, 2004). Existing studies on educational statistics achievement have mostly focused on factors such as statistics anxiety, self-efficacy, and attitudes, while technology-based research has remained limited in scope. Moreover, there is a notable lack of individualized tests designed to measure achievement. This study aims to design a technology-supported learning environment for educational statistics, grounded in the Sociocultural Learning Theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison et al., 2000). The 2 environment will employ a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) approach and develop a multistage adaptive test (MST) to measure statistical achievement. The design is intended to reduce students’ statistics anxiety and enhance their self-efficacy and achievement
This project aims to analyze the teaching methods, instructional materials, and learning objectives of statistics- and data-related courses offered within the Faculty of Education. By identifying similarities and differences among these courses, the project aims to determine the statistical and data literacy content required by graduates of various teacher education programs. Based on these findings, the project ultimately aims to design an “Introduction to Statistics and Data Science” course that addresses the identified needs.
Research outputs:
1. Koklu, O., Dede, M., & Sahal, M. (Under Review). Investigating how high school students learn ML: The case of decision trees for classification.
2. Koklu, O., Sahal, M., & Dede, M. (Under Review). A scoping review on teaching and learning machine learning for non-majors.
3. Koklu, O., Sahal, M., & Dede, M. (2026, April). Teaching artificial intelligence and machine learning to non-major students at university: a scoping review. Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Los Angeles, CA.
4. Dede, M. & Koklu, O. (2025, November). Makine öğrenmesine giriş: karar ağaçları ile lise düzeyinde müfredat geliştirme denemesi. Oral presentation at the 7th International Turkish Computer & Mathematics Education Symposium (TÜRKBİLMAT 7), Antalya, Turkey.
Despite the importance of the ratio-proportion topic and proportional reasoning, challenges and misconceptions persist among students and teachers. Common difficulties include the use of additive reasoning instead of multiplicative reasoning and the confusion between directly and inversely proportional relationships and nonproportional relationships. This project aims to develop dynamic interactive content for ratio and proportion topics using technological tools like GeoGebra, C#, HTML, and Unity. By designing dynamic tasks and visuals, the project seeks to enhance students’ conceptual understanding, reduce reliance on memorization-based methods, and improve proportional reasoning. Content design will follow an iterative process based on feedback and revisions. The designed content will be implemented in a selected middle school in Istanbul to understand the quality of the designed materials. The findings will be organized for publication and presented at international conferences. The project aims to develop dynamic interactive content that can contribute to effective mathematics education by addressing students’ challenges and enhancing their learning experience.
As educational assessment becomes more digitalized, computerized adaptive tests and its implications are receiving more attention. Adaptive tests often yield a single score based on IRT. However, one of the primary goals of assessment systems is to improve students' performance by providing adequate feedback, rather than merely assigning a single score. Therefore, researchers are looking into ways to improve the individualized feedback that adaptive tests provide to maximize the benefit and make it easier to incorporate adaptive tests into classroom environments. The Cognitive Diagnostic Multistage Testing (CD-MST) (von Davier & Cheng, 2014) and Cognitive Diagnostic Computerized Adaptive Testing (CD-CAT) (Huebner, 2010) are the outcomes of efforts to combine adaptive tests with cognitive diagnostic assessments to provide individualized feedback based on mastery of skills. However, CD-MST studies are primarily based on simulation research and live CD-MST research is missing in the field. Thus, the current project aims to develop a 4th grade mathematics test in the form of live CDMST in both Turkish and Spanish. This live test will be able to provide diagnostic feedback to students based on their mastery of skills.
The aim of this project is to explore shifts in prospective teachers’ (PSTs) professional noticing of students’ proportional reasoning through an intervention centered around formative feedback. Corresponding research questions are:
1. Does PSTs’ noticing of students’ proportional reasoning develop upon participating in a specifically designed course targeting noticing?
2. What is the role of feedback in development of PSTs’ noticing of students’ proportional reasoning within a specifically designed course targeting noticing?
In the context of this research project, an undergraduate course is designed by the research team. The aim of this course is to support prospective teachers in learning key practices of high-quality mathematics instruction such as noticing student thinking and providing effective feedback. Thus, the course in this study will constitute a model for teacher educators willing to design similar courses.
Preschool numeracy is a crucial foundation for STEM learning and long-term academic success. Previous research suggests that the development of strong numeracy skills depends on a combination of perceptual, cognitive, and language skills. However, most past studies have focused on a relatively small and homogeneous groups of children in US urban areas. As a result, current understanding of early numeracy may not
generalize to diverse groups of learners. It is likely that home language background, socio-economic status, and geographic and cross-cultural differences could also influence numeracy development. To address this, and to probe what factors drive early numeracy in a representative sample, this first-of-its-kind project investigates how toddlers and preschool-aged children perceive, reason, and talk about numbers in a massive multi-lab collaboration involving over 130 research sites worldwide.
To investigate early numeracy, this collaborative project includes two foundational studies. The first study focuses on how 2- to 5-year-old children perceive quantity, learn number words, and how to accurately count groups of objects. The study examines variability in how children learn about number and quantity while exploring the underlying perceptual, cognitive and linguistic mechanisms that drive their learning. The second foundational study focuses on toddler?s abilities to keep track of small groups of objects, which researchers have argued may play an especially important role in early numerical learning. This study examines variability across larger and more diverse groups of participants than previously studied. The study also asks whether limits to children?s object tracking abilities change when they begin to learn number words. In addition to these foundational studies, the project supports the creation of multiple exploratory studies, allowing for novel, ground-breaking collaborations between researchers worldwide. These exploratory studies examine how numerical abilities are related to diverse phenomena including but not limited to social cognition, linguistic diversity, cognitive abilities like executive function, and cross-cultural differences in mathematics education and attitudes. Collectively, these studies will test over 3000 children in 28 US states and 27 countries, using a combination of cross-sectional and longitudinal behavioral assessments. Final data will be shared with the broader scientific community, and will be presented on a website in simplified form to make findings accessible to the broader public.
This project is funded by the EHR Core Research (ECR) program, which supports work that advances fundamental research on STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.
