Investigation of the relationship between secondary students' mathematical thinking, problem solving and attitudes towards mathematics

Mathematics is one of the most important and compulsory courses in all countries. There is an international consensus on the need for schools to provide basic mathematical cognitive skills and mastery skills to all children and adolescents, regardless of the relevant culture or political system. However, there are difficulties in education system in many countries related to mathematics teaching.. At the beginning of the problems encountered in mathematics teaching, students are confronted with only the abstract structure of mathematics and they aim to be successful in exams by applying the concepts and rules that they do not understand. The hearth of this problem can be thought as the students may develop a negative attitude towards mathematics since their mathematical thinking and problem solving features are not developed sufficiently . From this point of view, the aim of this research was to examine mathematical problem-solving attitude of secondary school students, and the relationship between the characteristics of mathematical thinking and their attitudes towards mathematics. The research was a descriptive survey. Relational and causal comparison design was used as research design. The research sample consisted of 448 secondary school students in a district in the Western Black Sea Region. In the study, mathematics problem-solving attitude scale, mathematical thinking scale and attitude towards mathematics scale were used. In addition to descriptive statistics, correlation and multiple regression analysis-stepwise method were used to analyze the data. According to the findings of the study; the mathematics problem solving attitudes of secondary school students, their mathematical thinking characteristics and their attitudes towards mathematics were found to be relatively high. According to the results of the analysis, it was found that the correlation of the variables was positive, significant and high. It was observed that as the math problem solving attitudes and mathematical thinking characteristics of secondary school students increased, their attitudes towards mathematics increased. According to the results of multiple regression analysis, it was revealed that mathematics problem solving attitudes and mathematical thinking characteristics of secondary school students were significant predictors of their attitudes towards mathematics.