Proceedings of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education · Volume 1
Charlott Thomas, Birte Pöhler
Universität Potsdam
⬇ Download PDFThis study investigates the strategies that students employ when solving combinatorial problems. Therefore, a written test with 26 items was administered to 282 secondary students at the end of their school career. This paper focuses on higher-performing students who solved at least 75% of the tasks correctly, as their strategy use provides insights into successful approaches. The application of strategies was (overall and correctly applied) as well as the frequency and variance of strategies per person were analyzed. The findings indicate that higher-performing students predominantly rely on formulas, arithmetic rules, and systematic enumeration compared to other strategies and highlight the importance of fostering different combinatorial strategies in instruction and provide implications for the design of teaching learning environments.
combinatoricscombinatorial problem solvingstrategy usesecondary students