The Fifth Lesson: Students’ Responses to a Patterning Task Across the Four Countries

The chapter reports a comparative analysis of problem-solving activities in classrooms in the four countries. The problem students work with is a patterning task, taken from a major international comparative study. The idea of analyzing this group work across countries is to see what traces of algebra learning may be discerned in the work of the students. The results show the complexities of early algebra learning by presenting in detail the obvious variations in how students tackle the problem in more or less algebraic ways. In the small-group work in classrooms, students pool their ideas allowing for the discourse to build on itself in a cumulative manner.