Abstract

The present study aimed to examine the role of representations in solving statistical problems and to investigate fifth and sixth grade students’ translation ability and its relation to problem solving ability. A test sample consisted of 10 translation exercises in the different fields of representations- verbal, tabular, graphical and algebraic, was administered to 300 fifth and sixth grade primary school students. Methods of implicative statistical analysis and linear regression analysis were used to analyse the data. The results showed that there is no semantic congruence between the different representations. The translation tasks from the graphical to the verbal form were the easier for the students, while translation task from graphical or and tabular form to verbal (Provision) were the most difficult. The results also showed that translation ability is related to problem solving ability.