Relationships between cognitive pattern recognition and specific mathematical domains in mathematics education

Abstract

The understanding of the relationships between pattern recognition and mathematical abilities is important for students in their learning of mathematics and mathematics teachers in the design of their teaching pedagogies. This study examines the connections between pattern recognition and mathematical abilities of students from four Singapore private schools (52.7% male and 47.3% female) in arithmetic, algebra and geometry. Two validated instruments are used to measure the cognitive skills. At the end of the study, it is found that the students have moderate mastery levels of pattern recognition and mathematical ability. The study also discovers that most of the correlations between pattern recognition and mathematical abilities in the domains of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry are statistically significant. This lent support to not only the results from recent studies but also indicates that the long-standing relationships between these two cognitive abilities remain valid.