Dotty triangles

Two years ago we became interested in Papic, Mulligan and Mitchelmore’s (2011) findings that developing Australian pre-school children’s pattern awareness had a significant impact on their mathematics. We decided to try something similar, with English three to five year olds and their teachers, using activities based on this research. We were particularly interested in the potential benefits for disadvantaged children, which were found by Papic (2013) and Kidd et al. (2014). We were also interested in pattern as a cross-curricular math- ematical topic likely to appeal to early years teachers. With a group of nursery and reception year teachers we developed a pattern intervention based on Papic et al. (2011). In order to evaluate the effects of the intervention, we used several pre- and post-assessment tasks derived from Papic et al. and Mulligan, Mitchelmore and Stephanou (2015). One of these tasks involved showing children a six- dot triangle (see Figure 1) and asking them to copy it. In this article we discuss the children’s responses to this task, which we analysed using two different frameworks. This was because we felt that the initial framework did not dis- criminate sufficiently between responses and therefore did not recognise aspects of children’s thinking that we thought were important. While there is much we might discuss about the socio-cultural aspects involved, here we consider their responses from a cognitive viewpoint.