STRATEGIES OF PATTERN GENERALIZATION FOR ENHANCING STUDENTS’ ALGEBRAIC THINKING

Abstract

Mathematics is seen as a science of pattern. Identifying and using patterns is the essence of mathematical thinking for children to improve algebraic thinking from their early schooling. The pattern is an arrangement of objects that have regularities or properties that can be generalized. Therefore, it is essential to know the strategies used by students in generalizing patterns and how students think in these processes. This study is descriptive research with a mixed quantitative-qualitative approach that aimed to investigate student’s algebraic thinking using various strategies to generalize the visual pattern. An instrument about the linear geometric growing pattern was administrated to 75 upper primary school students (grades 5-6) and 81 lower secondary students (grades 7-8) in two private schools in Semarang, Indonesia. The results showed that students used different pattern generalization strategies. The student generally preferred recursive, chunking, and functional approaches in each generalization task, whereas few used counting from drawing strategies to generalize patterns. The use of the recursive strategy decreased, whereas the chunking strategy and the functional strategy increased across grades 5-8 for the problems. The results also showed the student who used the recursive and chunking strategy preferred to change visual patterns into rows of numbers. Hence, they adopt a numeric approach by finding the common difference of visible pattern in each step.