Prior work exploring preschool-aged children's reasoning with repeating patterns has shown that patterning ability is an important predictor of math achievement; however, there is limited research exploring older children's growing pattern task performance. The current study tested whether presentation format impacts performance on growing pattern…

The study was designed to probe students' thinking about which numerical values can be assigned to algebraic letters. The data from students in Year 7 (n = 533), Year 8 (n = 377) and Year 9 (n = 172) was analysed using response patterns. The data confirmed that each year contained students with two misconceptions; "Different Letter means…