Individuals who can solve the problems in everyday and business life is one of the primary goals of education due to the necessity to have problem solving skills to cope with life problems. Problem solving has an important role in mathematics education. Because of that, this research is aimed to examine the differentiation of secondary school students' problem solving success according to gender, class level, and mathematics course grade. Moreover, this paper explores the effect of secondary school students' attitudes toward mathematics and problem solving on problem solving success. The participants were 77 fifth-graders and 81 sixth-graders who were studying in three different secondary schools in a large city in Turkey. Two different attitude instruments and a problem solving test were administered to these volunteer fifth-and sixth-graders accompanied by mathematics teachers. Additionally, the students' mathematics course grades for the fall semester were obtained and used in the research. The results revealed that sixth-graders were more successful in problem solving than fifth-graders. The problem solving success of female and male students was similar, and there was an intermediate positive relationship between problem solving success and course grade point averages. The students' attitudes affected their problem solving success.

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Any form of talk-in-interaction is organized in relation to progressivity (Schegloff, 2007; Hosoda & Aline, 2013). Progressivity of interaction may involve resolving interactional troubles and producing subsequent talk, and it is endemic to the organisation of conversation at the level of turn construction (Schegloff, 1979). In testing speaking skills, as progressivity of talk between peers is central for teachers to be able to assess students’ performances, troubles that halt progressivity and the resolution of such troubles by the students deserve close analyses. Against this background, this paper focuses on how paired L2 (i.e., English) speaking assessment interactions unfold in a Turkish higher education context. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we investigated the interactional resources that are deployed to maintain progressivity when there is a halt in the unfolding interaction, an under-researched phenomenon in L2 speaking assessment contexts. We used transcriptions of 100 video-recorded paired test interactions, each of which were approximately four minutes long. We identified and described the ways interactional trouble was flagged, paying close attention to how embodied resources, such as hand and other gestures, gaze direction, posture and body orientation, and facial expressions (Nevile, 2015), are used by the interactants. Based on 100 paired assessment interactions our findings reveal that in moments of interactional trouble participants make transitions to a sub-topic, formulate understandings, and engage in collaborative completions to maintain progressivity, using a variety of interactional resources as part of their interactional repertoires. The ways such troubles unfold in interaction and how they are resolved by L2 users to maintain progressivity of test-talk have potential to inform research on the assessment of Interactional Competence.

The aim of this study was to examine the abstraction process of tenth grade students' complex number knowledge. A semi-structured interview was held with two students who were successful at mathematics and who voluntarily participated in the study. In this interview, the students faced three different research problems prepared by the researcher in order to reveal the students' knowledge formation processes. The students studied these research problems together. In the meantime, their cognitive processes related to recognizing, building-with, and constructing of discourses was analysed. The analyses indicated that both of the students recognized and built-with the preliminary knowledge necessary for them to construct the knowledge of complex numbers. Moreover, it was understood that one of these students recognized and build-with their previous knowledge of linear functions, coordinate systems, and parallel displacement. In conclusion, it could be said that this student constructed the knowledge of complex plane.

In this research study, it was aimed to examine failures and inabilities of eleventh grade students about quadratic equations and functions. For this purpose, these students were asked ten open-ended questions. The analysis of the answers given by the students to these questions indicated that a significant part of these students had failures and inabilities about quadratic equations and functions. The students were often unable to decide what to do in relation to the mathematical operations and made some arithmetical mistakes.