The aim of this research is to determine the attitudes of mathematics teacher candidates towards scientific research and their thinking style and whether there is a significant relationship between these two. The sample of the research is constituted of 83 second year students studying at the Mathematics Education Department, Ahmet Keleşoğlu Education Faculty, Necmettin Erbakan University in the spring semester of 2017-2018 academic years. The relational screening model was used in the analysis of the data. The 'Thinking Styles Scale' developed by Sternberg and Wagner [47] and adapted to Turkish by Buluş [8], and the 'Attitude Scale towards Scientific Research' developed by Korkmaz, Şahin and Yeşil [31] were used as data collection tools in the research. Research findings show that there is no significant relationship between the thinking styles of the teacher candidates and their attitudes towards scientific research. It was found that the highest relationship was between positive attitudes toward research and open-minded (liberal) thinking styles.

In this study, it was aimed both to examine middle school students' perceptions of the concept of pattern and to reveal if the metaphoric perceptions which the students created in relation to the concept of pattern changed according to the variable of grade level. The metaphors in relation to the concept were carried out via the "phenomenological" design. For this, a short open ended form was directed to the volunteer fifth, sixth, and seventh-grade students who attended to the research from a middle school in Turkey. The qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis. Besides, the chi-square test was used for quantitative analysis. The perceptions of middle school students were gathered under six different categories. Moreover, the analyses made within the scope of this study revealed that the metaphors which the participant students created for the concept of pattern did not indicate significant difference according to the grade levels.