Developmental Differences in Children’s Strategies and Errors on a Repeating Pattern Task

• In Event: Beyond Accuracy: Children’s Correct and Incorrect Strategies on Early STEM Tasks Provide Insights into Cognitive Development

Abstract

Children’s skills with repeating patterns are central to their cognitive development (Miller et al., 2016) and are associated with formal academic achievement (Burgoyne et al., 2017). Despite increasing research in this domain, little is known about how children solve patterning tasks and whether children’s correct and incorrect strategies change with age. Understanding children’s strategy use can elucidate the cognitive processes children employ to solve patterning tasks across development, and can ultimately help to identify effective strategies and problem solving skills to incorporate in early interventions.

This study examines how four- to six-year-old children solve pattern tasks and whether children’s strategy choices and errors change with age. We focus on repeating patterns that have a unit of repeat (e.g., a unit AB that repeats to form the pattern ABABAB). We selected pattern abstraction as the target task; this task requires children to view a model pattern and recreate the structure of that pattern using novel materials. Pattern abstraction was selected for two reasons: (1) it is theorized to tap into children’s attention to structure (e.g., Collins & Laski, 2015) and (2) children ages 4 to 6 can solve pattern abstraction tasks, but with substantial individual differences, thus allowing us to investigate both correct and incorrect strategies within the same sample.

Ninety children (Mage = 5.4 years) solved a series of pattern abstraction tasks that required children to recreate the structure of a model pattern using novel materials. The model patterns varied on two dimensions (shape and size). A subset of children (n = 30) also completed a brief numeracy assessment. On the pattern tasks, we coded children’s correct strategies and their errors. Correct strategies differed in whether children attended to one dimension or two (e.g., copied only the shape structure or copied the shape and size structure; see Figure 1 for examples of correct strategies). Errors differed in whether they contained structure (e.g., creating the wrong type of pattern) or no structure (e.g., random sequence of objects).

Children’s accuracy on the pattern items was modest, but increased with age and was positively related to numeracy knowledge. We also demonstrated that (a) children’s correct strategies tended to rely on one dimension rather than two dimensions; (b) older children (ages 7 to 9) were more likely to attend to shape in their correct strategies (alone or in combination with size) than younger children (ages 4 to 6; see Figure 2); (c) children’s errors often included some structure as opposed to being random; and (d) the proportion of strategies that were two-dimension and the proportion of errors that were structured were both positively related to children’s accuracy on subsequent pattern items. These findings suggest that there are developmental differences in whether and how children solved pattern items correctly, and that differences in children’s patterning strategies and errors are important for understanding early patterning capabilities. We will discuss how these findings have implications for educational outcomes, school readiness, and intervention programs.

Authors

• Giulia Alexandra Borriello, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Presenting Author

• Emily Fyfe, Indiana University - Bloomington
  Non-Presenting Author