Examinion of 6th students' quantitative reasoning skills and developments in their problem solving process

The purpose of this research is to examine middle school grade 6 students' quantitative reasoning skills and developments in their problem solving process. In this research, qualitative research methods were adopted for data collection, analysis and interpretation. In this context, teaching experiment model was used. The implementations of the research were carried out with four grade 6 students in total, two girls and two boys, who were attending school in 1.Hava İkmal Bakım Merkezi Primary School located in the center of Eskişehir in 2012-2013 academic year.. During the entire teaching experiment in which it was aimed to identify students' quantitative reasoning skills and observe their developments, clinical interviews, worksheets, clinical interviews with videotapes of teaching process, student journals, and researcher journals were used as data collection tools, and a thematic analysis was used for data analysis. As results of the research, it was observed that students who had low quantitative reasoning skills in pre-interviews improved their quantitative reasoning skills notably in post-interviews as a result of the teaching experiment. It was identified that students had higher successes in understanding the problems, selecting appropriate strategies to the problem situation, carrying out the selected strategy and evaluating stages after the teaching experiment. Also, it was observed that using diagrams, tables, and visual representations which take efficient roles during quantitative reasoning became as a habit after the teaching experiment.. Besides, it was observed that the development of students' quantitative reasoning contributed to their algebraic development and achievement levels in mathematics.