Representations and patterns used by fifth grade students in a generalization task

Abstract

In this article we present some of the results of a wider research study whose main goal is to investigate the strategies and representations used by Year 5 students in a generalization task which is based on a generic example. We collected information in the regular classroom for a group of 20 students of that year, through a writing generalization task that involves ten questions related to functional relations between two variables. In this paper we present the analysis and results of the answers to four questions. We emphasize the diversity of representations used in the responses, the use of various patterns as the most frequent strategy, and the evidence of students’ generalization capacity.