Elementary School Students’ Ways of Thinking in Geometry Through the Lens of Geometric Habits of Mind

Abstract

Geometric habits of mind include several ways of thinking that can be used in the learning and teaching of geometry as well as the reasoning ability in the process of solving the geometry problem. Based on this framework, revealing students' geometric reasoning process can shed light to researchers and teachers in the selection and design of methods and materials. This study is aimed to investigate the geometric problem-solving processes of elementary school students based on the GHoM. In this qualitative study case study design was adopted. The participants of the study consisted of six elementary school students. In the interviews the students can easily use reasoning with the relationship GHoM in all tasks. Generalizing and investigating invariants habits can be seen in some of the tasks. However balancing exploration and reflection habits were appeared rare when compared to other GHoMs. It can be suggested that to reveal the ways of reasoning of the students, non-routine and open-ended geometry tasks similar to those designed for this research can be utilized in mathematics classes.