Let's discover the solution: look for a pattern!

Abstract

With the support of the Content Pedagogy Research Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, we have developed a research program that examines the characteristics of problem-solving thinking in different age groups. In our paper, we analyse students' responses to a question that can represent a proper problem for each age group. Our research focuses primarily on students' capabilities of modelling and recognizing patterns. Our question is the following: how does recognizing patterns and arguing for them lead to discovery. We also examine how do different types of representations of the same problem affect the problem solving process.