• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.619-636
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• 2012

The main purpose of this study was to explore the process of generalization generated by mathematically gifted students. Specifically, this study probed how fourth, fifth, and sixth graders might generalize geometric patterns and represent such generalization. The subjects of this study were a total of 30 students from gifted classes of one elementary school in Korea. The results of this study showed that on the question of the launch stage, students used a lot of recursive strategies that built mainly on a few specific numbers in the given pattern in order to decide the number of successive differences. On the question of the towards a working generalization stage, however, upper graders tend to use a contextual strategy of looking for a pattern or making an equation based on the given information. The more difficult task, more students used recursive strategies or concrete strategies such as drawing or skip-counting. On the question of the towards an explicit generalization stage, students tended to describe patterns linguistically. However, upper graders used more frequently algebraic representations (symbols or formulas) than lower graders did. This tendency was consistent with regard to the question of the towards a justification stage. This result implies that mathematically gifted students use similar strategies in the process of generalizing a geometric pattern but upper graders prefer to use algebraic representations to demonstrate their thinking process more concisely. As this study examines the strategies students use to generalize a geometric pattern, it can provoke discussion on what kinds of prompts may be useful to promote a generalization ability of gifted students and what sorts of teaching strategies are possible to move from linguistic representations to algebraic representations.