Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Participatory Educational Research, cilt.8, sa.3, ss.422-440, 2021 (Scopus)
The purpose of this study is to examine how pre-service elementary
teachers generalize a non-linear figural pattern task and justify their
generalizations. More specifically, this study focuses on strategies and
reasoning types employed by pre-service elementary teachers throughout
generalization and justification processes. Data were collected from 32
pre-service elementary teachers who were enrolled in the Elementary
Teacher Education program of a university, Turkey. During the data
collection process, these pre-service teachers were first asked to
generalize a non-linear figural pattern task and were then asked to justify
their generalizations. To analyze the pre-service elementary teachers’
written answers for the task considering reasoning types for both
generalization and justification, data reduction and constant comparative
methodologies were used (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014). The
findings indicated that the pre-service teachers were better able to find a
rule for the pattern using the explicit strategy. It was also found that
although these pre-service teachers used different types of reasoning
which were numerical reasoning, figural reasoning, and pragmatic
reasoning, figural reasoning was the most frequent one throughout the
generalization process. Reasoning types for justification by the preservice teachers fell into two categories: inductive and deductive. Most
pre-service teachers resorted to inductive reasoning; however, there were
a few pre-service teachers who referred to deductive reasoning. In
addition, the pre-service teachers who articulated figural reasoning to
generalize appeared to be more successful in justifying their developed
rules deductively.