Abstract

BARBOSA, Ana; VALE, Isabel  and  PALHARES, Pedro. Pattern tasks: thinking processes used by 6th grade students. Relime [online]. 2012, vol.15, n.3, pp.273-293. ISSN 2007-6819.

This paper gives a description of an ongoing study focused on pattern exploration and generalization tasks, analysing the performance of fifty-four 6^th grade students when solving this type of tasks. The main goal is to understand the strategies they use, difficulties that emerge from students' work and ascertain the role played by visualization in their reasoning. Results so far indicate that, in general, students tend to use numeric instead of visual approaches. They also tend to use incorrect strategies when attempting to generalize, the most common being an incorrect use of direct proportion.

Keywords : Patterns; Generalization; Strategies; Visualization.

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