Making It Count: Strategies for Improving Problem-Solving Skills in Mathematics for Students and Teachers’ Classroom Management

Understanding a problem is as important as solving it to understand the meaning of mathematics. It is a widespread view that problem-solving skills help individuals to overcome the problems easily in their daily lives. An individual with problem-solving skills is a self-confident, creative and independent thinker. It can be explicable that the societies formed by these individuals can easily solve the problems. In this vein, this study is aimed to determine the relationship between the acquisition of problem-solving skills that play an important role in mathematics alongside two dimensions of classroom management which are time management and plan-program management. It is thought that there is a close relationship between these two dimensions; problem-solving skills. The types of problems are divided into two; routine and non-routine. The aim is to get opinions about how these problems will be taught by mathematics teachers, at what level they will be used in class and what methods they will use for them. The study was conducted by doing a content analysis of qualitative research methods. The sample group which is randomly determined from five provinces of North Cyprus is composed of mathematics teachers who teach at the 9th grade level. The data was collected through semi-structured interview forms. Content analysis technique was used in the evaluation of the obtained data. As a result, it was found out that the mathematics teachers who work in the Ministry of National Education and teach at the 9th grade, have been given importance to problem-solving skills such as, problem-solving duration and problem-solving methods in their classes. In addition, the teachers pointed out that the time given is not sufficient at schools and they could not give enough importance to plan-program activities. They also pointed out that although the annual and monthly plans specified by the Ministry, the desired variety of questions could not be provided by different methods.