Abstract:
The purpose of the study is to perform a less-dimensional thorough visualization
process for the purpose of determining the images of the students on the concept
of angle. The Ward clustering analysis combined with Self-Organizing Neural
Network Map (SOM) has been used for the dimension process. The Conceptual
Understanding Tool, which consisted of the open-ended question “write the first
ten things you remember when the term „angle‟ is mentioned” to the study
group, which consisted of 250 seventh grade students. The analysis results
showed that students mostly explained the concept of angle by associating it
with mathematics and other sciences with the terms like “reflection and
incidence angle, numbers, light, graphics, fraction, area, speed, algebraic
expressions, energy, sound, four operations, viewpoint, electricity and natural
numbers”. The students mostly established relations with the static side of the
angle. At the end of the study, the dataset obtained from the Conceptual
Understanding Tool was used for training the SOM, and a structure that reveals
the images of the students on angle has been recommended
