The current study explores the conceptual understanding of secondary level students in mathematics. The participants were 1320 students of 10th grade and 180 students of 11th grade randomly selected from 33 public secondary and 17 higher secondary schools of Lahore. The article describes the performance of students on six grade 1-7 level questions related to numbers, number operations, and algebra. One question was knowledge level and rest five were analysis level questions. Four questions were related to Knowledge of primary level Content and Students that required participants to analyze the error or explanations related to the problem. The other two questions were related to middle school content knowledge. The questions were adapted from Hill et. al. (2004)s instrument of Study of Instructional Improvement (SII). The success rate of students was ranging from 52.8 to 63.8 % on six questions and from 22 to 73.5 % on 15 sub-questions.

This study is intended to examine the correlation between working memory of students and their academic performance in Mathematics. Specifically, it was aimed to determine the degree of relationship between working memory capacity and academic achievement of students in mathematics studying at secondary school. A sample of 800 students studying in grade 10 was randomly selected from forty government and private secondary schools (girls and boys) situated in Hazara division, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Both Urdu and English mediums of instruction schools were included in the sample. The researcher used digits span backwards test (DSBT) to find out the working memory capacity of the students associated with their academic performance in mathematics. This study revealed that girls have outperformed boys very markedly in examination scores of mathematics at secondary level. Contrarily, boys have performed well in working memory capacity than girls at the secondary level. However a very small gender difference is observed in this study. It is also noticed that private secondary schools showed higher performance in examination scores of mathematics and in working memory capacity than government secondary schoolsl.