The 14th International Congress on Mathematical Education

Shanghai, 12th ‒19th July, 2020 PAPER TEMPLATE

GUIDING STUDENTS’ REIVENTION OF COMBINATORIAL OPERATIONS

Belmira Mota Rosa Antónia Tomás Ferreira

Colégio Efanor & Faculty of Sciences, UP Faculty of Sciences & CMUP, UP

In this paper, we share the results of a teaching experiment involving a class of thirty-one 12th graders
(17-18 years-old), in northern Portugal, for 12 lessons of 90 minutes each, aimed at engaging them in
the guided reinvention of the formulas for the basic combinatorial operations, focusing on
combinations. Supported on the premises of Realistic Mathematics Education and on Lockwood’s
model for students’ combinatorial thinking. Students worked in challenging and contextualized tasks
in an inquiry-based teaching approach. Data were collected through direct observation, videotaped
lessons and several documents. The results corroborate the relationships described in Lockwood’s
model. Yet, a strong relationship seems to exist between counting processes and the
formulas/expressions that translate the answers to the tasks. We suggest some aspects that need to be
accounted for in the design of tasks, searching to support a deeper understanding of the formulas for
combinations, and we offer some thoughts on possible details that may be added to Lockwood’s model.

MOTIVATION AND RESEARCH GOALS

As children progress in their schooling, combinatorics shows itself as a topic that most students find
difficult to learn, and many teachers find difficult to teach (e.g., English, 2005). Solving combinatorial
problems involves using some counting operations, such as permutations, repeating and non-repeating
arrangements, and combinations. These four operations can be named as combinatorial operations,
and each one is associated with a counting formula. Research has shown that students experience
significant difficulties in distinguishing problem situations whose solution involves arrangements from
those involving combinations (e.g., Lockwood, Swinyard, & Caughman, 2015). Such difficulties
suggest that students do not understand the differences in the mathematical structure underpinning the
two operations, and that they do not ascribe meaning to the respective mathematical formulas.
The guided reinvention approach
One of the main pillars of Realistic Mathematics Education is students’ guided reinvention of the
distinct mathematical concepts they deal with throughout their school path (Gravemeijer, 2008).
Following Gravemeijer, Cobb, Bowers, and Whitenack (2000), the guided reinvention is seen as “a
process by which students formalize their informal understandings and intuitions” (p. 237). As such,
“students can formalize ideas through generalization of their previous mathematical activity”
(Lockwood et al., 2015, p. 28), thus constructing mathematical concepts with meaning. Several studies
suggest that students may develop a coherent reasoning about mathematical concepts by engaging with
tasks specifically designed to guide the reinvention of those concepts (e.g., Lockwood et al., 2015).
The guided reinvention approach moves away from that in which topics are first taught/presented to
students, and students are then asked to solve tasks in order to apply what they have learned. The
reinvention of mathematical concepts provides researchers with “a lens through which to gain insight

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into how students come to understand particular mathematical concepts” (Lockwood et al., 2015, p.
28), and supports the design of learning sequences aimed at helping students develop a relational
understanding of combinatorial concepts and processes.
A model of students’ combinatorial thinking
Lockwood (2013) emphasizes the need to “identify, trace, describe, and explain students’
conceptualizations of the solving of combinatorial tasks” (p. 252), and she proposes a model of
students’ combinatorial thinking. This model has three interrelated components: formulas/expressions,
counting processes, and sets of outcomes. “Formulas/expressions refer to mathematical expressions
that yield some numerical value (…) The counting processes refer to the enumeration process (or series
of processes) in which a counter engages (either mentally or physically)” (pp. 252-253). Considering
a procedure as being a counting process depends in the individual’s experience. “The set of outcomes
refers to the set of elements that one can imagine being generated or enumerated by a counting process”
(p. 253), thus being the set whose cardinal represents the answer to the problem. Our research, which
is still ongoing, builds on the premises of Realistic Mathematics Education (Gravemeijer, 2008) and
on Lockwood’s (2013) model of students’ combinatorial thinking. We seek to understand how the
guided reinvention of the fundamental counting principle and of the formulas for the combinatorial
operations helps students choosing the adequate operations to solve combinatorial problems of distinct
cognitive demand. In this paper, we focus on the reinvention of the formula for combinations.
METHODOLOGY
Following a qualitative and interpretive approach, we designed a teaching experiment (Steffe &
Thompson, 2000) that lasted 12 class sessions of 90 minutes each. The participants were a class of 31
twelfth graders (17-18 years-old), in a school located in a small village in northern Portugal, and the
teacher was the first author of this paper. Students worked in small groups of three to four elements,
in an inquiry-based approach (Oliveira, Menezes, & Canavarro, 2013; Ponte, 2005), and, at the time
of the research, they had not yet studied any of the counting formulas. Though other structures are
possible, we used a model comprised of four phases (Oliveira et al., 2013): 1) introduction to the task;
2) students’ autonomous work on the task; 3) collective discussion of solutions and strategies used to
solve the task; and 4) systematization of (new) knowledge. In this paper, we focus on the two class
sessions in which students were guided to reinvent the formula for combinations, and we draw on the
work of two groups, chosen due to distinct performances in the tasks.
We paid special attention to the contexts of the tasks, which drew on the reality of students. This is to
say that the tasks’ contexts were built on what students experience as real and on what they ascribe
meaning to, be it daily life, semi-real, or pure mathematics situations, or even imaginary scenarios,
which are achievable and conceivable in students’ minds (Freudenthal, 1991). Amongst the various
types of tasks, we privileged problems in Ponte’s (2005) sense: closed tasks (in which the givens and
the goals are clearly stated) of a certain cognitive demand (which, nonetheless, is relative to the solver),
whose solution path (or paths) is open to the solver. The data were collected through participant
observation of the teacher/researcher, videotaped lessons, and students’ written productions on the
four tasks that were proposed to guide their reinvention of the formula for combinations. We analyze
students’ work using Lockwood’s (2013) model to interpret their combinatorial thinking.

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A BRIEF SUMMARY OF RESULTS

In a prior study, Mota and Tomás Ferreira (2016) suggested that the relationship between counting
processes and formulas/expressions in Lockwood’s (2013) model was weak regarding the reinvention
of the formula for combinations. We believe that the counting processes should not be circumscribed
to the counting fundamental principle or to schemes leading to that principle. This approach leads
students to the multiplication operation when, in fact, all elementary operations are necessary to solve
combinatorial problems. Thus, the gradual introduction of division in the tasks proposed to students
helped them realizing that division should also be considered when solving combinatorial problems.
As such, the first task involved applying the counting fundamental principle; the second involved
applying the formula for permutations, which they had already reinvented.
The third task asked to find the number of groups of two people that are possible to make, from a set
of 15 people. The productions of all groups support Tillema’s (2013) suggestion that the value of the
solution influences the correctness rate of combinatorial problems. For example, students in group I
resorted to situations with a numerically low cardinality for the sets of outcomes, so that they managed
to use counting processes that could lead them to list all elements of the set of outcomes. Afterwards,
they looked for a pattern that could be transposed to the initial problem. Students began to draw
schemes that allowed them to conclude that the number of groups of two people they could make from
a set of three and a set of four people was, respectively, 1 + 2 = 3 and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. They then
generalized the pattern and concluded that the answer to the task was 1 + 2 + 3 + ⋯ + 14 = 105.
Nevertheless, they acknowledged that this strategy would not be adequate of the initial set had a rather
+,×+.
large cardinal. Thus, after accessing the cardinal of the space of outcomes, they recognized that /
is also a correct formula: “we divided by 2 because there would always be two that were repeated”.
This approach finds echo in Lockwood’s et al. (2015) suggestion that resorting to empirical patterning
may characterize the relationship between the set of outcomes and formulas/expressions. Moreover,
knowing the cardinal of the set of outcomes seemed to have allowed the establishment of a new
formula, which leads us to suggest that there might be a biunivocal relationship between the set of
outcomes and formulas/expressions in Lockwood’s (2013) model.
The fourth task asked for the number of groups with three elements that can be made from a set of
seven and, afterwards, it asked for the number of groups with k elements, from a set of n. A student in
group II explained the group’s approach:
We had 7 𝐴1 for the number of sequences one could make (…). But then, we had ABC, CAB, for example,
and this was all the same, but different sequences. So, we realized we had to get the number of sequences
and find some way to remove what was a surplus. At first, when we made groups of 2 with 3 people, we
divided by 2; so we thought about dividing by 2 in all [cases]. But then we saw we were wrong, and we went
back to see where we had made a mistake. Since 2! = 2 (…) We saw that, if there were 3 [elements], there
were 6 possible sequences and we realized it was 3! [The value] 2 was actually a coincidence of being 2!
So, then, we generalized: for k elements, we have to divide the [number of] sequences by k!
The work of these two groups suggests that empirical patterning does not promote the understanding
of the formulas it leads to whenever the student resorts to this process merely to reach the formula. On
the contrary, if the student attempts to justify the veracity of the formula using new counting processes,

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patterning may work as a first step of a sequence of relationships between the three components of
Lockwood’s (2013) model for students’ combinatorial thinking, as depicted in figure 1.

Figure 1: Analysis of this study’s results in light of Lockwood’s (2013) model

Acknowledgements
Work partially supported by CMUP (UID/MAT/00144/2019), funded by FCT with national (MCTES)
and European structural funds via FEDER programs, under the partnership agreement PT2020.

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