A proposal of categorisation for analysing inductive reasoning

Abstract

We present an analysis of the inductive reasoning of twelve Spanish secondary students in a mathematical problem-solving context. Students were interviewed while they worked on two different problems. Based on Polya´s steps and Reid’s stages for a process of inductive reasoning, we propose a more precise categorization for analyzing this kind of reasoning in our particular context. In this paper we present some results of a wider investigation (Cañadas, 2002)