Reed 2021
Reed 2021
Reed 2021
To cite this article: Zackery Reed & Elise Lockwood (2021): Leveraging a Categorization Activity
to Facilitate Productive Generalizing Activity and Combinatorial Thinking, Cognition and Instruction,
DOI: 10.1080/07370008.2021.1887192
Article views: 62
ABSTRACT
In this paper, we present data from two iterative teaching experiments involving students’ con-
structions of four basic counting problems. The teaching experiments were designed to leverage
the generalizing activities of relating and extending to provide students with opportunities to
reflect on initial combinatorial activity when constructing these formulas. We discuss three com-
binatorial ways of thinking that emerged from their work on this task and provide commentary on
the interplay between the students’ generalizing activities and engagement in the emergent ways
of thinking. We address the practical goals of identifying ways that students productively reason in
combinatorics, and we provide a theoretical commentary on students’ reflection on activity as it
occurs in the context of particular generalizing actions.
Introduction
Enumerative combinatorics involves the solving of counting problems, which ask for the number
of outcomes that satisfy particular constraints. Being able to solve such problems has applications
in fields including probability, statistics, and computer science, and the easy–to–state nature of
the problems make them accessible to students and provide opportunities for rich mathematical
thinking (e.g., Kapur, 1970; Tucker, 2002). There is evidence that combinatorics is a difficult topic
for students to learn (e.g., Hadar & Hadass, 1981; Martin, 2001; Tucker, 2002), and students at
all ages tend to struggle with correctly solving counting problems (e.g., Annin & Lai, 2010;
Batanero, Navarro–Pelayo, & Godino,1997; Eizenberg & Zaslavsky, 2004; Kavousian, 2008). Prior
research has shown that students find it challenging to distinguish between counting problems
(e.g., Batanero, et al., 1997), and often face difficulties with justifying counting formulas (e.g.,
Batanero, et al., 1997; Lockwood, 2014). We see a need to identify aspects of students’ rich com-
binatorial understandings of basic counting problems and their formulas so that students can be
equipped to solve and understand advanced counting problems.
We are also interested in studying the practice of generalization more broadly, especially in
non–algebraic contexts and among undergraduate students. We seek to contribute to the field’s
understanding of the nature of generalization by documenting the use of specific generalizing
actions to foster students’ engagement with desirable ways of thinking as a means of refining and
regulating their reflection on activity. We demonstrate this within the domain of combinatorics,
but we suggest in the discussion section that we are presenting a case of a broader phenomenon.
In this paper, we discuss the results of two iterative teaching experiments in which under-
graduate students engaged in a set of activities that was designed to elicit reflection on, and gen-
eralization of, initial combinatorial activity. This activity, called the Categorization Activity,
CONTACT Zackery Reed zackkr@okstate.edu Oklahoma State University, 401 Mathematical Sciences Building, Stillwater,
OK, 74078, USA.
ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
2 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
consisted of three phases: initial solving of counting problems, relating through categorization,
and extending through characterization.
We seek to address the following research goals in this paper. First, we have the pragmatic
goal of gaining insight into ways that students might reason about and productively understand
distinctions among formulas for fundamental counting problems. A second pragmatic goal is to
highlight particular combinatorial ways of thinking that emerged during students’ work on the
Categorization Activity which characterize salient aspects of the students’ reasoning that we found
to be productive. That is, we are not only interested in demonstrating that students could come
up with and justify key formulas–we also want to describe the combinatorial ways of thinking on
which they drew to accomplish this task. We believe that this attention to ways of thinking pro-
vides us insight into the nature of productive combinatorial thinking and activity.
We also seek to offer a more substantial theoretical contribution to the field’s understanding
of the relationship between generalization, ways of thinking, and reflection on activity. We lever-
age generalizing actions as explicit actions through which students can build on initial activity
and generate productive understandings of basic formulas. While reflection on initial activity is a
well–documented aspect of learning and generalization (e.g., Ellis, Lockwood, Tillema, & Moore,
2017; Gravemeijer, Cobb, Bowers, & Whitenack, 2000; Harel & Tall, 1991; Piaget, 2001), we pro-
vide detailed accounts of the students’ reflections through the relating and extending generalizing
actions (Ellis et al., 2017), and demonstrate a relationship between these generalizing actions and
students’ ways of thinking (Harel, 2008a, 2008b). We thus make two contributions to the field’s
understanding of generalization. First, we make use of the Relating–Forming–Extending frame-
work (Ellis et al., 2017) to offer a detailed analysis of the ways students might reflect on their ini-
tial activity to construct general understandings. Second, we highlight specific aspects of the
relationship between students’ generalizations and their mathematical ways of thinking. We do
this by demonstrating that the students’ generalizing activities both drew from and reinforced
these ways of thinking in the different phases of the Categorization Activity, and we argue that
this ultimately helped to refine students’ final understandings of the counting formulas.
In this paper, we attempt to answer the following research question to address our research
goals: What generalizing activities and combinatorial ways of thinking can help students articulate
and distinguish between problem types and understand key formulas in combinatorics?
Generalization
Our study explores ways that generalizing actions can be explicitly leveraged to engage students
in reflections on initial activity so as to promote desirable combinatorial ways of thinking and
ways of understanding fundamental counting formulas.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 3
1
More broadly, reflection on and coordination of specific mathematical activity is often considered an important component of
mathematical learning (e.g., Dubinsky, 1991; Gravemeijer, Cobb, Bowers, & Whitenack, 2000; Piaget, 2001; Sfard, 1991).
4 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
For purposes of describing students’ activity as they generalize, we adopt Ellis et al.’s (2017)
Relating–Forming–Extending (R–F–E) framework of generalizing activity. Each category in the
framework represents a different manifestation of generalizing activity in student work. We will
only focus on relating and extending for the purposes of this paper, as these were the only two
constructs that we incorporated into our experimental design. In particular, the hypotheses that
we initially set out to test in our teaching experiments incorporated only relating and extending
as earlier constructs from Ellis (2007a), from which the R–F–E framework was refined.
Relating occurs when students establish “relations of similarity across problems or contexts”
(Ellis et al., 2017, p. 680). The key feature of relating is that students are establishing such rela-
tionships of similarity, and previous work has documented students relating many different kinds
of mathematical objects, phenomena, or processes. For instance, students might articulate rela-
tions of similarity among the wording of problems, symbolic features, formulas or expressions,
numerical regularity, figural similarity within various representations, or solution methods (Ellis,
2007a; 2007c; Ellis et al., 2017; Lockwood, 2011). We will focus on students’ relating of initial
activity, which is but one kind of relationship students can establish when relating.
Extending involves the application of established patterns and regularities to new cases (p.
680). Much like with relating, the nature of the patterns and regularities that students extend can
vary – students may extend solution processes, techniques, numerical patterns, and figurate or
operative relationships. Given the possible variety of ways in which students might engage in
these generalizing actions, we are interested in the kinds of relationships that students establish
between particular counting problems that can contribute to extending that leverages productive
combinatorial understandings. This is in line with our practical goal of generating models of pro-
ductive combinatorial reasoning from empirical data.
Moreover, we consider these generalizing actions to be the observable mathematical actions
from which we can infer students’ cognitive organizations. Another primary goal of our study is
to better understand the roles that the generalizing actions of relating and extending can play in
facilitating students’ reflection on initial activity. In pursuit of this goal, we make use of the
R–F–E framework to explore ways in which generalizing actions can support students to refine
particular understandings and elicit particular ways of thinking. To make claims about the ways
in which our students understood the general counting formulas through engagement in these
generalizing actions, we require a means of elaborating students’ actions and utterances in regard
to their cognition. For this, we turn to Harel’s (2008a, 2008b) constructs of ways of understanding
and ways of thinking in the next section.
2
Our use of the generic term “understanding” should be interpreted as students’ ways of understanding in terms of
Harel (2008a)
3
We acknowledge that according to Harel (2008a), ways of thinking can take a long time to form and stabilize. We clarify that
the characteristics of our students’ mental activity suggest (rather than unequivocally demonstrate) certain ways of thinking.
Thus, we use ways of thinking to attribute observed cognitive characteristics of the students’ initial activities that, given time,
might produce the described ways of thinking.
6 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
We thus employ the ways of understanding construct to attribute the students’ understandings
of various problem types to the enactment and envisioning of mental acts carried out in counting
contexts. We then draw from the R–F–E framework to examine the ways that the students organ-
ized and then broadened the range of applicability of their initial understandings when engaging
in the relating and extending, and also to examine the relationship between students’ generalizing
and ways of thinking.
Synthesizing our theoretical constructs and discussing reflection on activity. To synthesize our
theoretical perspectives, then, we draw both from Ellis et al.’s framework (2018) for generalizing
and Harel’s (2008) constructs of ways of understanding and ways of thinking to provide a
detailed, comprehensive account of students’ reflection on initial activity. Reflection on activity
has traditionally been broadly construed in terms of cognitive reorganization. Wheatley (1992) –
drawing from Sigel (1981) – described students “distanc[ing] themselves from the activity and
“hold[ing] the activity in thought” to “make their activity an object which can be examined” (p.
536). Similarly, Piaget’s notion of reflective abstraction (von Glasersfeld, 1995; Piaget, 2001) entails
the projection and subsequent reflection (reorganization) of borrowed mental operations to
higher levels of thought (von Glasersfeld, 1995; Piaget 2001), from which other theories such as
APOS (Dubinsky, 1991) have been developed. While these characterizations have repeatedly been
employed in empirical work, we consider there to be room for studies that specify particular
activities that might elicit the occurrence of such reflection. We present one such detailed account
of reflection on activity.
Specifically, we first draw from Harel’s ways of understanding construct to make inferences
about students’ initial solutions of counting problems, considering their understandings as initial
cognitive material from which to generalize. The students’ ways of understanding are akin to the
mental operations to be projected and reorganized in reflective abstraction. We interpret that we
can make inferences about students’ cognition (which we discuss in terms of ways of thinking
and ways of understanding) via observing their mathematical activity. We then employ the relat-
ing and extending constructs in our experimental design as the particular observable mathemat-
ical generalizing actions through which students have opportunities to reorganize and broaden
the applicability of their ways of understanding. We consider relating and extending to serve as
actions that mediates students’ reflection on initial activity.
We then analyze the cognitive organizations from students’ relating and extending activities,
particularly attending to relationships that students find meaningful.4 For instance, we attend to
whether students organize their initial activity according to features of their mental operations,
numerical relationships, or other features they perceive in the initial problems they solve. In this
way, we account for the nature of the students’ reflection on their initial activity by attending to
the features of their activity that they found meaningful when relating and extending.
We will see that the students consistently engaged in particular ways of thinking while count-
ing and generalizing. This engagement allows us to leverage Harel’s ways of thinking construct as
an explanatory mechanism for the students’ initial activity and organizations when generalizing.
Finally, we draw from the students’ utterances and demonstrated mathematical activities to make
inferences about the ways they understood their eventually constructed counting formulas,
attending to the particular mental acts from their initial activity that the students applied to
broader classes of problems through the process of generalizing.
In sum, we attempt to inform the theory of generalization by providing a finer grained analysis
of ways that specific reflections on initial activity serve to regulate students’ generalizations,
emphasizing the nature of their reflection. Being able to observe this phenomenon also brings
into focus the impact of students’ ways of thinking on their generalizing.
4
This is in accordance with an actor-oriented perspective (Lobato, 2003)
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 7
We also examine students’ potential ways of thinking (Harel, 2008a, 2008b) in combinatorics
and explore how these ways of thinking might influence students’ understandings of basic count-
ing formulas. For instance, Lockwood (2013) has emphasized the importance of having students
draw on the set of outcomes of a counting problem, which are the set of objects being counted.
Lockwood (2014) further emphasized this point by introducing a set–oriented perspective, where
the set of outcomes becomes a cornerstone of reasoning about any particular counting problem.
A set–oriented perspective is an example of a combinatorial way of thinking (in the sense of
Harel, 2008a), as engagement with sets of outcomes involves an organizational or structural char-
acteristic of the mental acts involved in solving these problems. Lockwood (2014) defined this
perspective as “a way of thinking about counting that involves attending to sets of outcomes as
an intrinsic component of solving counting problems” (p. 31). Generally, a variety of activities
could suggest that a student is employing a set–oriented perspective, including explicitly articulat-
ing one or more outcomes that a given counting problem is meant to count, creating a partial or
complete list of outcomes, or making a combinatorial argument or justification based on particu-
lar outcomes. This perspective aligns with our view of combinatorial thinking, and we considered
the importance of such a way of thinking as we designed our study and analyzed data.
We will contribute to the literature on student understanding in combinatorics by elaborating
three combinatorial ways of thinking that emerged during students’ initial activity solving four
different types of basic counting problems. A major goal of our research is to identify productive
ways of thinking in combinatorics, and, in this paper, to demonstrate mechanisms by which gen-
eralizing activities and combinatorial ways of thinking were related to students’ understandings of
general counting formulas. We point to three combinatorial ways of thinking rooted in our stu-
dents’ combinatorial activity, from which they then drew when generalizing to ultimately con-
struct the general counting formulas. This highlights ways in which these students’ thinking
address issues discussed in the literature of identifying and justifying formulas for counting prob-
lems (Batanero et al., 1997; Lockwood, 2014).
Mathematical discussion
Here we discuss the specific combinatorial problems with which the students engaged. This will
situate the mathematical context of the students’ activity. We had students solve four kinds of
problems during the teaching experiments. These are some of the same problem types students in
Lockwood et al. (2015a) solved: r–permutation problems, n–permutation problems, selection
problems, and arrangement with unrestricted repetition problems. These four problem types
make up the majority of the basic counting problems in introductory combinatorics texts (see,
for example, Martin, 2001; Rosen, 2007; Tucker, 2002) and lay the foundation for more compli-
cated counting processes (such as arrangement and selection with repetition). By further examin-
ing students’ constructions of the same problems in Lockwood et al.’s (2015) study, we offer a
contrasting case wherein students understand the basic counting problems combinatorially rather
than strictly numerically.
Methods
In this paper, we draw on two iterative teaching experiments (Steffe, Thompson, & Glasersfeld,
2000) conducted as part of a larger study that investigated the nature of students’ generalizations
in a variety of mathematical settings. We first conducted a paired teaching experiment (hereafter
referred to as ‘PTE’) consisting of fifteen 60 min sessions with two students. One year later, we
conducted a small group teaching experiment (hereafter referred to as ‘SGTE’) consisting of nine
n!
Þ! , in which we consider arranging all n objects of the set. But,
5
There is another useful interpretation of the quotient ðnr
since we only care about the first r positions, for each arrangement of the first r positions, the arrangements of the remaining
n–r positions actually constitute equivalent outcomes (hence the division by ðn–rÞ!).
10 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
90 min sessions with four students. In pursuit of our practical research goals, as well as the
broader goal of investigating ways that generalization contributes to students’ construction of
combinatorial understandings, we had the following research hypotheses at the onset of the PTE.
Essentially, we hypothesized that it would be productive to have students engage in some robust
combinatorial activity (facilitating a set–oriented perspective), then be given opportunities to
relate and extend based on that initial rich combinatorial activity.
1. Engaging in a set–oriented perspective can help students correctly solve counting problems
and distinguish between problem types and formulas.
2. Students can develop and reinforce desirable understandings about counting problems by
relating previously–solved problems via coordinating combinatorial activity.
3. Students can then extend such desirable understandings to new contexts by drawing on com-
binatorial patterns and regularities that have been established from organizations of men-
tal activity.
Our use of teaching experiments to test these hypotheses and pursue these goals is in line with
the overall goals of teaching experiments, particularly to “experience, firsthand, students’ mathem-
atical learning and reasoning” (p. 267), to “[make] essential distinctions in students’ ways and
means of operating” (p. 274), and to “[experiment] with the ways and means of influencing stu-
dents’ mathematical knowledge” (p. 273). This involves frequent hypothesis generation and test-
ing and produces models of student thinking generated from observing the students’ independent
mathematical activity (ibid.).
Participant description
As Steffe et al. (2000) point out, the “research hypotheses one formulates prior to a teaching
experiment guide the initial selection of the students … ” (p. 275). Because we were interested in
ways that students would construct understandings of the basic counting formulas through gener-
alizing from initial activities, we sought students that were unlikely to draw from prior con-
structed schemes for the general counting formulas when solving counting problems. We use the
term “novice counters” to describe such students. By novice counters, we mean students who
were not familiar with the four basic counting formulas and problem types that are the focus of
this study (discussed in Section 2.4 above).
While we cannot ensure that students have never seen combinatorics problems before (most
see at least some simple combinatorial tasks in middle school), during the selection interviews for
this study we had three ways to determine that these students were novice counters. First, we
asked what prior mathematics classes students had taken in high school or college. Novice coun-
ters had not taken probability or statistics, discrete mathematics, or computer science classes that
might have involved counting (some counting may occur in precalculus classes, but none had
taken an explicit course involving discrete mathematics). Second, we presented students with sev-
eral symbols, including some typically associated with permutations, combinations, and other
n
basic operations of counting. These were: nPr, Pðn, rÞ, nCr, Cðn, rÞ, n!, ð Þ, A B, and
P r
1k10 k: We asked them if they had seen the symbols before, and, if they had, where they had
seen them and what the symbols meant. The only formula students recognized was n!, but this
was only in a calculus (Taylor series) setting, and they did not demonstrate having a combinator-
ial interpretation of it.6 Third, students solved multiple counting problems, which allowed us to
evaluate whether their mathematical activity was novel or whether they were drawing on extant
6
It is typical for students to be exposed to n! in calculus in a non–combinatorial context; see Lockwood & Erickson (2017) for
additional insight on students’ reasoning about factorials.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 11
combinatorial schemes (e.g., recalling formulas). We considered further evidence that students
were novice counters if they did not try to apply a formula to these problems, but rather
attempted to list outcomes or guessed at an answer. Recruiting novice counters helped to ensure
that our students’ initial activity was novel, and that they were truly engaging in generalization
rather than relying on extant knowledge of the counting formulas to drive their activity.
We also sought students who demonstrated a willingness to engage in problem solving, a pro-
pensity to work well with others, and who were willing to articulate their thinking. In line with
these participant constraints, we recruited undergraduate students enrolled in a vector calculus
class at the time of enrollment in the study.7 We conducted individual, 30–60 min long selection
interviews which were audio and videotaped. A full list of selection interview tasks is in
Appendix A.
For the PTE, we chose two students (Rose and Sanjeev, pseudonyms) out of the total six inter-
viewees. We had the students work together so that it was more likely that they would look to
each other for confirmation and ideas when problem solving rather than to the teacher–re-
searcher. We paired Rose and Sanjeev together because they satisfied our criteria, and we inferred
from their selection interviews that they were similar in terms of mathematical ability, maturity,
background, and willingness and ability to express their thinking. We sought similar students
because we were engaging in initial testing of our hypotheses and wanted to minimize the varia-
bles of the experiment – we did not want one student to dominate based on their counting abil-
ity, for example.
For the SGTE, we chose four students (Carson, Anne–Marie, Aaron, and Josh, pseudonyms).
Here, our selection criteria were slightly different, and we sought a group of four students that
would represent a more balanced collection of students in a classroom small group.8 We still
sought novice counters who were willing to engage with the material and communicate their
ideas, but we also aimed to have a set of students who were more diverse in terms of their initial
proficiency solving counting problems. We measured this diversity in terms of their success in
solving problems in the selection interviews, and we sought both students that were and were not
able to successfully reason about most of the selection tasks. We attained this more diverse com-
position by roughly ranking the initial 10 students who participated in the selection interviews in
terms of their initial solutions, and we then chose a group of four that spread across our rankings
and whose schedules allowed for participation.9
Data collection
A teaching experiment (Steffe et al., 2000) includes some number of teaching episodes that con-
sist of several main elements: “a teaching agent, one or more students, a witness of the teaching
episodes, and a method of recording what transpires during the episode” (p. 273). Steffe et al. use
the term “teacher–researcher” for the researcher who plays the role of instructor in the teaching
experiment. Teaching experiment methodology allows researchers to “[experiment] with the ways
7
We have had positive previous experience working with vector calculus students. We have found that they are an excellent
population for combinatorics studies because they demonstrate some mathematical maturity but tend to have limited
background combinatorial knowledge.
8
When thinking of a whole class situation, we are thinking of a course where mathematics majors might first be exposed to
combinatorics. At many universities this would be in an introduction to proof course that is typically called Discrete
Mathematics, and vector calculus students are a reasonable population for such a course. We acknowledge that novice
counters may also be enrolled in less–advanced mathematics classes, and we discuss this further in the Future
Directions section.
9
Carson answered all but one problem correctly and demonstrated proficiency with organizing outcomes and early
engagement in what we later identified as positional reasoning. Aaron and Anne–Marie had successfully answered some of
the questions; they reasoned positionally in some instances and demonstrated thoughtful engagement with the set of
outcomes. Josh also demonstrated thoughtful engagement with the set of outcomes and could reason additively, but he did
not successfully coordinate the more complicated combinatorial situations.
12 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
and means of influencing students’ mathematical knowledge” and to “[understand] the progress
students make over extended periods”, making teaching experiments distinct from other experi-
mental methods such as clinical interviews (p. 273).
The 15 h–long sessions of the PTE occurred over the course of six weeks, and the students
were monetarily compensated for their time. During each session, the students worked together
at a chalk board. We gave the students counting problems to solve together and prompted them
to explain their thinking as they worked. While these sessions were generally designed to test the
three major research hypotheses, student activity within each session elicited responsive and ana-
lytical interactions on part of the researcher as hypotheses were further generated and tested
(Steffe et al., 2000, pp. 280). Further details on the tasks in the first three sessions are elaborated
in Section 3.4.
The SGTE data collection occurred one year after the PTE data collection. During the interim
time between experiments, we conducted retrospective analysis (Steffe et al., 2000) on the data
from the PTE (described below). An outcome of such analysis was refinement of the initial global
hypotheses of the experiment to include emergent productive ways of thinking that were identi-
fied in the PTE data analysis (further discussed in the results, Section 4.1). In particular, we
altered hypothesis 1 to include these productive ways of thinking that might potentially emerge
from student activity. As a result, we engaged in conceptual analysis (von Glasersfeld, 1995;
Thompson, 2008) to generate hypothetical models of these ways of thinking and incorporated
these models into our hypothesis generation and testing during the sessions.
This experiment consisted of nine 90 min sessions with the SGTE students.10 Instead of work-
ing on the board, the students sat at a table facing each other and wrote their individual work on
sheets of paper. The overall progression of the Categorization Activity was largely replicated with
the SGTE students; however, our interventions reflected the testing of our refined research
hypotheses. In particular, the “analytical interactions” (Steffe et al., 2000, pp. 281) of the teacher–-
researcher with the students were geared toward determining the extent to which the students
were engaging in the three ways of thinking identified from the PTE, and to test the boundaries
of their reasoning.
Data analysis
The sessions in both experiments were each videotaped, and we performed a retrospective ana-
lysis (Steffe et al., 2000) on the video records. The sessions were transcribed, and we enhanced
the transcripts with notes and figures representing student activity. For the purposes of this
paper, we focused our analysis on the first three sessions of both experiments, as those sessions
specifically pertained to the Categorization Activity and the students’ constructions of the basic
counting formulas. Results of this analysis are “living models of students’ mathematics” (p. 284)
from which theoretical constructs important to our research program “emerge in the form of spe-
cific and concrete explanations of students’ mathematical activity” (p. 293).
As described above, we draw on the specific constructs of Harel’s (2008) ways of understand-
ing and ways of thinking. To build these models of students’ mathematics, we identified the com-
ponents of the mental act–product–characteristic triad of Harel’s (2008a) Duality Framework for
cognitive activity. Specifically, Harel outlines a particular analytical process for identifying stu-
dents’ ways of thinking and ways of understanding that relies on attention to the particular men-
tal acts in which students are engaged:
10
One student could not attend the first session. He watched a video record of the first session, and he was instructed to also
solve the problems the other students solved and then listen to their discussion so he could be prepared for the
next sessions.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 13
In carrying out this analytical process, we relied on the students’ utterances and actions to
infer the nature of the activities they were carrying out that resulted in their particular under-
standings of the counting formulas in each of the three stages of the task. Over time, we also
made inferences about the recurring characteristics of their mental activity and understandings so
that their reasoning could be identified as adhering to certain ways of thinking that we further
identify in the results.
We in tandem identified when the students engaged in the generalizing actions of relating and
extending, paying attention to the particulars of the students’ mental organizations when general-
izing. More specifically, when the students engaged in relating, we paid particular attention to the
relationships being established by the students and to the initial ways of understanding being
coordinated in relating. Similarly, when analyzing the students’ engagement in extending, we
made inferences from their activity and utterances about the particular established relationships
and regularities being applied in a broader context, and the scope to which these relationships
were being broadened. In this way, we did not merely identify when they were engaging in gener-
alizing actions, but engaged in conceptual analysis (Thompson, 2008; Steffe et al., 2000) to infer
the ways the students were organizing their mental structures while generalizing.11 One applica-
tion of this analytical process was the identification of the students’ continual engagement in the
combinatorial ways of thinking both in their initial activity and throughout the generalization
process. Through this analysis, we identified the students’ process of generalization as an instance
of reflection on activity and examined the particular facets of their reflection.
Categorization activity
We now present the Categorization Activity, the broad sequence of tasks in which the students
engaged when constructing understandings of the four basic counting formulas. The
Categorization Activity consists of three phases: Initial problem solving activity, relating through
categorization, and extending through characterization (Table 1). We describe these and connect
them to specific generalizing activities they are designed to elicit in terms of Ellis et al.’s (2017)
R–F–E framework. In particular, these tasks serve as an experimental design from which to test
our research hypotheses. The goal of this task was to engage students explicitly in relating and
extending, and to give students opportunities to construct robust understandings of basic count-
ing principles. The intentional design to engage students in these generalizing actions reflects our
goal of examining the ways that supporting specific reflection on activity might elicit productive
understandings.
11
For the purpose of this paper, we report particularly on those instances of generalizing that were in conjunction with the
major phases of our experimental design according to the testing of our major hypotheses, noting that the students
generalized throughout.
14 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
Table 2. Arrangement with unlimited repetition problems solved by the PTE and SGTE students during their respective
experiments.
Problem name Problem statement Solution PTE SGTE
Houses You want to paint 6 different houses on the block, and 36 X X
there are 3 acceptable paint colors that you can pick.
How many possible outcomes are there for how to
paint the neighborhood?
License Plates How many ways are there to make a 6–character license 366 X X
plate consisting of the letters A–Z and the
numbers 0–9?
Quiz Questions How many ways are there to complete an 8–question 48 X X
multiple choice quiz if there are four possible answers
to each question?
3–Letter Sequences How many 3–letter sequences are there consisting of the 63 X
(repeat) letters a f ?
Ternary Sequences How many 3–digit ternary sequences are there? 33 X
Table 3. n–Permutation Problems (arrangement without repetition) solved by the PTE and SGTE students during their respect-
ive experiments.
Problem name Problem statement Solution PTE SGTE
FAMILY In how many ways can you arrange the letters in the word FAMILY? 6! X X
Recess How many ways are there for 27 kids to line up for recess? 27! X X
Projects How many ways are there to assign 8 different projects to 8 different students? 8! X X
MATH In how many ways can you arrange the letters in the word MATH? 4! X
Initial activity
Throughout the first two sessions of each experiment, we gave each respective set of students the
problems in Tables 2–5. The aim here was to give students opportunities to engage in combina-
torial problem solving and initial activity on which they could subsequently reflect via the specific
generalizing actions of relating and extending. Tables 2–5 show the problems we gave each set of
students (the X in the last two columns indicates that we gave that problem to the students in
that teaching experiment).
Notably, this initial activity was an important part of the task design, as the students’ initial
combinatorial understandings would become the underlying cognitive material on which they
reflected during the next two phases. During this phase we probed the students for utterances
and activities from which we could test and generate hypotheses regarding their developing
understandings of the counting problems they were solving. We would frequently prompt for
exposition, provide further prompts to test the boundaries of their reasoning, and attempt to
draw out activity from which we could make inferences regarding their cognitive products and
characteristics. Differences between the PTE and the SGTE are due to conceptual analyses
between sessions.
Table 4. r–Permutation Problems (arrangement without repetition) solved by the PTE and SGTE students during their respect-
ive experiments.
Problem name Problem statement Solution PTE SGTE
3–Letter Sequences How many 3–letter sequences are 6!
3! ¼654 X
(no repeat) there consisting of the letters a f
, if no repetition of letters
is allowed?
Restaurants A town has 25 restaurants. How many 25!
20! ¼ 25 24 23 22 21 X X
ways are there to rank your five
favorite restaurants?
Horse Race There are 10 horses in a race. In how 10!
7! ¼ 10 9 8 X
many different ways can the horses
finish in first, second, and
third place?
Cats and Collars You have a red, a blue, a yellow, and 7!
3! ¼7654 X X
a purple collar. In how many ways
can you distribute the 4 collars
among 7 cats so that each cat will
wear at most one collar?
Table 5. Combination Problems (selection without repetition) solved by the PTE and SGTE students during their respective
experiments.
Problem name Problem statement Solution PTE SGTE
8!
Lollipops How many ways are there to distribute 3 identical lollipops to 8 children? 5!3! X X
Subsets How many 4–element subsets are there of the set f0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9g? 10!
6!4! X X
their generalizing, we wanted to see whether they would look back on their initial activity at all,
and, if they did, to what aspects of their initial activity they would attend. Our goal was not sim-
ply to have the students engage in relating activity, but for us to gain insight into what and how
they would relate, hypothesizing that it would be productive to relate certain combinatorial activ-
ities rather than symbolic features or numerical patterns. After constructing the categories, the
students were prompted to explain why they grouped problems the way they did. In this way,
categorizing facilitated relating activity (in both the sorting and discussing) that would allow us
to observe and make inferences into the ways they organized their initial activity.
Once the students agreed on the categories for the problems, we asked them to describe the
specific problem type from each category, and to construct a general formula for the solution to
each problem type. By characterizing their categories, the students had opportunities to extend
the patterns and regularities they had established through relating.12
By observing the students’ generalizing actions and experimentally determining the boundaries
of their reasoning, we constructed models of the students’ reflection on activity according to the
constraints of our own reasoning and interpretations. These models find their viability in the degree
to which they offer means of explaining students’ independent mathematical activity as observed by
teachers and researchers in future studies and instruction (Steffe et al., 2000, pp. 298).
12
Forming (Ellis et al. (2017) implicitly took place at the onset of their engagement in characterization, as the students
attended to regularity in the structures within each group. This subsequently provided the means by which they could extend
their combinatorial understandings to make formal statements about the structure of each group and give general formulas
for solving the counting problems that each group represented. The students’ observable actions were manifestations of
extending, however, and so our analysis attends to the students’ acts of extending.
16 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
activities from which we infer salient aspects of their cognition, particularly highlighting productive
ways of thinking in combinatorics that emerged from our analysis the data. We also aim to high-
light the interactions between the students’ activities associated with three ways of thinking and
their engagement in relating and extending. We do not have space to elaborate the students’ work
on every task, but we provide examples of their work to give a sense of what the sessions entailed
and to showcase their reasoning and interactions. In describing the students’ initial activity in the
PTE, we highlight three ways of thinking that we associate with the students’ mathematics. We
identify and discuss these ways of thinking before presenting the students’ categorization and char-
acterization stages, so that we may then describe the influence of those ways of thinking both on
their generalizing activity and on their final understandings of the counting formulas. We then
explore the final two phases of the Categorization Activity and discuss the ways in which the stu-
dents leveraged these ways of thinking to construct the final counting formulas as a result of their
generalizing activity. In doing so, we provide a detailed account of their reflection on initial activity
and the leveraging of the students’ ways of thinking in this reflection.
13
We remind the reader that we do not conjecture the causality of the students’ developing these ways of thinking, nor do
we claim that they had fully adopted them as ways of thinking. Rather, we identify repeated engagement in mental acts that
we see as associated with these ways of thinking.
14
Due to spatial concerns, we can only present a representative sample of the students’ actions and utterances. Rose was
generally more succinct with her statements, and thus we present her responses more of the time than we do Sanjeev. In
accordance with Steffe et al.’s (2000) methodology, we probed and identified the boundaries of both students’ reasonings and
are confident that both students exemplified the kinds of reasoning we describe.
15
Rose was the first selection interviewee, and we refined the selection interviews after her interview, so Sanjeev saw a
slightly different set of problems.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 17
In her response, Rose noted that the last three letters could be arranged in any order. We
asked the students to justify why that quotient made sense combinatorially (and not just algebra-
ically). Rose gave the following response.
Rose: Well, for the last 3 digits you could have … let’s call this just a,b, and c. You could have d,e,f. You
could have e,d,f or f,e,d [lists these sequences as in Figure 1]. I mean, these would all be considered
different arrangements, but since we’re only looking at the first 3 we don’t care if these are different
[crosses out d, e, f; e, d, f; f, e, d]. These [the final three letters] can be as different as they want, but as long
as these [the first three letters] are the same, then we can only show it once.
Notably, in this latter explanation we feel that Rose emphasized sets of outcomes as a way in
which to explain the division by 3!. She seemed to think of the arrangements of the letters of d,
e, and f as creating duplicates that she did not want to count. This discussion of duplicate out-
3! : This suggests that her division
comes was in the context of her justifying her initial answer as 6!
by 3! operationalized her intention to account for identical arrangements of the final three letters
in her desired outcome.
While solving this problem, Sanjeev also drew an array of possible outcomes, given in
Figure 2, and reasoned according to the arrangement of the outcome collection to justify the
solution 6 5 4. About this diagram, Sanjeev said
Sanjeev: “ … this spot right here would be the 4 options. And then within each row [meaning column] this
is – since all the As are used up, there’s 5 different options here, so that would be another 5 options. And
then because there are six letters, and each letter has its own – you can start with each letter, then you end
up with 6 up here.
This is an instance of Sanjeev reasoning about what we would consider to be the set of out-
comes. In particular, Sanjeev envisioned the collection of outcomes could be constructed in a
manner consistent with his partial listing of the outcomes, which is consistent with the mental
actions associated with a set–oriented perspective (Lockwood, 2014). The students then demon-
strated engagement in similar mental actions while solving each novel problem in the initial activ-
ity phase. The students would discuss the organization of outcomes either using a representation
18 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
of the “branching” that occurs through outcomes construction,16 or discussing lists of particular
outcomes as a means of discerning what Rose called a “pattern”. In sum, the students engaged in
mental activities that we associate with a set–oriented perspective while solving each problem in
the first phase of the experiment.
Positional reasoning
The students also discussed 6 5 4 as a meaningful representation of the solution by conceiving
of the problem in terms of considering options for each of three positions (i.e., imagining con-
structing an outcome by filling in “positions” or “spots”). Rose described what she was thinking,
and she explained the 6 5 4 by saying:
Rose: Well, for the first spot you have 6 different letters to choose from,
a, b, c, d, e, f . And then since you’re only allowed to keep the letters for the second spot you only have 5
letters to choose from, a, b, c, d, e, f minus whichever one you just used for the first one. And then for the
3rd one you only have 4 letters to choose from, because you’ve already used 2.
Sanjeev reasoned in a similar way. He started a process in which he was listing pairs of out-
comes, and first described making pairs starting with each letter. He continued by saying, “Then
I can go and say, okay, I’d like to add in a 3rd letter … So you only have 4 letters to choose
from so in this case if a and b are used up, then I get to choose between c, d, e, or f.” Sanjeev’s
explanation suggests he was reasoning about having certain numbers of options as he constructed
the sequences. In listing a partial set of outcomes, Sanjeev attended to sets of outcomes and set a
foundation for a relationship between his employed counting process and the generated out-
come sets.
This example demonstrates another combinatorial way of thinking upon which the students
drew, which we call positional reasoning. When solving counting problems, it can be useful to
think about generating a representative outcome by considering a counting process that involves
enumerating the choices for some given number of stages in the process, which can support the
16
We call this a tree diagram.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 19
Figure 3. Students organizing a partial outcome (top numbers) and enumerating the options for each potential “spot” (bot-
tom numbers).
use of the multiplication principle.17 Generating the representative outcome might involve writing
representative elements for each stage in the process along with the number of choices available,
or it might involve simply listing the number of options at each stage. The particular cognitive
characteristics associated with positional reasoning is that the carrying out of the counting pro-
cess involves construction of a representative outcome, and the piece–wise construction of the
outcome can occur in singular stages (or “positions”, which Rose and Sanjeev called “spots”). Not
all problems are solved by reasoning about positions in this way, but for many problems it is use-
ful to reason positionally. This example also highlights the interaction of multiple ways of think-
ing, as we interpret that the students are both reasoning positionally and adopting a set–oriented
perspective.
For each problem in the initial activity phase, Rose and Sanjeev described constructing the
outcomes of the counting process through progressive “spot”–filling with elements of outcomes.
They would then negotiate the enumeration of the options for each “spot” according to the con-
straints of the problem. They would then either use this enumeration as counting the outcome
set, or an outcome set from which to build the desired outcome set for the problem.18 In each
problem beyond this example, the students explicitly drew out the “spots” they were describing
(see Figure 3), working with this representation as a means of organizing the progressive steps in
the counting processes they envisioned.
17
The idea behind the multiplication principle is that for successive stages in a counting process, one can multiply the number
of options for each stage as long as the number of options is independent of each previous stage and the composite
outcomes are all distinct. We prefer Tucker’s (2002) statement of the multiplication principle; see Lockwood, Reed, &
Caughman (2017) and Lockwood and Purdy (2019a, 2019b) for additional information about the multiplication principle.
18
For combination problems, this was the first step of their counting process, from which they would further partition
according to “duplicate” outcomes, see below.
19
Here they used the language of “duplicates”.
20 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
students were solving the Subsets problem (which asks for the number of 4–element subsets of
the set of numbers from 0 to 9) we see that they were reasoning about dividing out by
“duplicates” as a way to count the desired outcomes.
Sanjeev: How many 4–element subsets are contained in this set [f0, 1, 2, 3g]? So, 0,1,2,3 … would be the
same as 3,2,1,0 –
Rose: – 0, yes. … So, we just need to figure out how many different variations you can make from one
group [of four elements], and divide by that.
They had found that there were 24 possible arrangements (or “different variations”) of four
numbers, and they clarified that they should divide.
Sanjeev: … sorry, of those 24 possible arrangements –
Rose: So, it would just –
Sanjeev: – we only want 1.
Rose: We only want 1 –
Sanjeev: Right.
Rose: – because they’re all the same. So, we would just take that whole thing right there [their current
6! and just … so it’s just 10987 divided by 24.
calculation 10P4 ¼ 10!
Sanjeev: Divided by 24. … This, then, accounts for duplicates.
Rose: Yeah, that [dividing 10! by 6!] accounts for the spots that we don’t care about, and that [subsequently
dividing by 24] accounts for duplicates.
We suggest that Rose and Sanjeev were engaging in mental acts that involve coordinating a
collection of equivalent outcomes so that a single representative generates their desired collection
of representative outcomes. In this example, Rose and Sanjeev leveraged equivalence in two dis-
tinct ways. First, 10! represented the number of ways to arrange all elements in a 10–element set,
and so the division by 6! accounted for the equivalence of those arrangements that reorder the
last 6 of 10 elements, as only four elements were desired (this is similar to Rose’s argument on
the 3–letter sequences problem discussed previously). Second, as more explicitly discussed in the
excerpt, they acknowledged that a set of the form f0, 1, 2, 3g is “the same” as a set where the ele-
ments are rearranged. Since every 4 elements can be rearranged 24 times, they only want a single
outcome for every 24 arrangements, and so the division by 24 accounts for the “duplicate” out-
comes of rearranged 4–element subsets.
The students first independently attended to outcome equivalence in the Lollipops problem
(the third problem they solved). For each subsequent problem, the students made sure to verify
whether there were particular outcomes that they could conceive of producing via a counting
process but would be considered “duplicates” under the constraints of the problem. When appro-
priate, the students would then employ division to re–scale their outcome set enumeration to
account for such duplicates. They also discussed duplicates generated from including “unwanted
spots” specifically for the r–permutation problems.20 In sum, the students incorporated attention
to duplication of desired outcomes into their strategy for solving counting problems, and consist-
ently operationalized outcome–duplication when necessary.
To summarize their initial activity, we contend that Rose and Sanjeev demonstrated engage-
ment in activities that we associate with three ways of thinking: a) thinking about sets of out-
comes, b) reasoning about positions, c) and thinking about and leveraging equivalence. We now
continue with a description of their categorization and characterization stages in the PTE, in
which they constructed the general counting formulas. We will demonstrate that the students
20
These discussions were akin to Rose’s justification that 6!
3! and 6 5 4 both counted the 3–letter sequences of the letters a –
f, presented in Section 4.1.1.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 21
Table 6. Rose and Sanjeev’s Categorization of problems in the Categorization Task (parenthesis indicate researcher labels).
Group Problem name Problem statement Solution
Group 1 (n- FAMILY In how many ways can you arrange the 6!
permutations) letters in the word FAMILY?
Recess How many ways are there for 27 kids to 27!
line up for recess?
Projects How many ways are there to assign 8 8!
different projects to 8
different students?
Group 2 3–Letter Sequences How many 3–letter sequences are there 654
(r–permutations) consisting of the letters a – f , if no
repetition of letters is allowed?
Restaurants A town has 25 restaurants. How many 25!
20! ¼ 25 24 23 22 21
ways are there to rank your five
favorite restaurants?
8!
Group 3 Lollipops How many ways are there to distribute 3 5!3!
(r–combinations) identical lollipops to 8 children?
10!
Subsets How many 4–element subsets are there 6!4!
of the set f0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9g?
Group 4 (arrangements Houses You want to paint 6 different houses on 36
with the block, and there are 3 acceptable
unrestricted repetition) paint colors that you can pick. How
many possible outcomes are there for
how to paint the neighborhood?
License Plates How many ways are there to make a 366
6–character license plate consisting of
the letters A–Z and the numbers 0–9?
Quiz Questions How many ways are there to complete 48
an 8–question multiple choice quiz if
there are four possible answers to
each question?
continued to organize and engage in the same mental acts while generalizing, and that their con-
tinued engagement in the mental acts associated with these ways of thinking served to regulate
their generalizing.
21
Although we phrased this prompt to suggest that the students attend to their activity when relating, we do not consider
our phrasing alone to affect students’ cognitive activity significantly. Rather, we consider the students’ mental coordinations in
the context of these prompts as the primary object of analysis.
22
The students made one change during the discussion of these groups, but the change was due to a misreading of the
wording on the Subsets problem.
22 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
highlight the students’ organizations of their mental activity while establishing and explicating
their perceived relations between counting problems. In this way, it is the students’ cognitive
activity elicited through their engagement in relating that is the focus of our analysis. Moreover,
we want to highlight that the students continued to demonstrate cognitive characteristics associ-
ated with our identified ways of thinking while generalizing.
We found it noteworthy that the students highlighted both similarities and differences as they
engaged in relating and categorizing the problems. With regard to our practical goal of identify-
ing ways that students might make meaningful distinctions between counting problems, we find
it useful to consider both comparing and contrasting as engagements in relating. That is, for the
purpose of model building we found it useful to consider relating as involving attention to mean-
ingful differences across situations while attempting to regulate the ways in which these situations
might be similar. We now briefly highlight some of these comparisons, which demonstrates how
the students were reasoning about separating the problems into groups. We do not have space to
exemplify every comparison they made, but we provide examples of and elaborate the students
comparing Group 1 versus Group 2, Groups 1 and 2 versus Group 4, and Groups 2 versus
Group 3 (see Table 3 for which set of problems the group numbers refer). By doing this, we are
not just demonstrating that they related, we want to draw attention to what and how they were
relating as they categorized problems.
Here, to compare problems, Rose distinguished between whether or not options could be
repeated, and she also considered what was allowed in the particular positions. We find this kind
of distinction productive and in accordance with a set–oriented perspective and positional reason-
ing, and it seemed to be meaningful for the students because they were themselves formulating
and articulating these distinctions. In particular, the students explicitly articulated that Group 4
involved constructing outcomes without restricting elements of the outcome. We infer that,
through their relating, the students’ organized their ways of understanding the various
“arrangement with unrestricted repetition” problems from their initial activity according to the
combinatorial mental act of outcome construction with particular attention to the lack of a need
for outcome restriction. Moreover, the students created mental boundaries between their Group 4
and their other groupings according to this mental act.
Their uses of positional reasoning and a set–oriented perspective further highlight the role that
ways of thinking can play in regulating the students’ constructed understandings while engaging
in the generalizing action of relating. In this case, distinguishing between these groups entailed
the re–envisioning of the activity through which the outcomes were constructed, and we argue
that this enabled their engagement in ways of thinking they had used to solve such problems in
the first phase. From this we infer an interplay between the students’ demonstrated ways of think-
ing and their engagement in the generalizing action of relating.
We point out that they appealed to actual outcomes to articulate the difference between
groups. The distinction of making f1,2,3g and f3,2,1g the same explicitly attends to which out-
comes should or should not be counted as similar. We contend that they reasoned with sets of
outcomes to understand the differences between combinations and permutations. Further, their
language suggests the influence of positional reasoning and equivalence. In accordance with the
previous two examples of the mental organization of their past activity while engaging in relating,
here we see the students’ leveraging of equivalence served to establish meaningful relationships
between the problems where outcome orderings were considered the same, and simultaneously
establish a meaningful difference between problems where this was not the case. Specifically, the
students understood the collection of combination problems as groupings of equivalent outcomes
organized according to non–equivalent groupings and understood these groupings as a boundary
feature of these problems. This further illustrates the students’ leveraging their ways of thinking
to regulate the relationships created during their relating activity.
24 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
23
We note that they engaged in forming as well, but their observable utterances and actions were manifestations of
extending. We thus focused on extending in our analysis.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 25
We infer from this discussion that he was leveraging positional reasoning. Rose also clarified
that n represents “the amount of objects that we have” and said the answer for this kind of prob-
lem “would just be the amount of objects you have factorial.”
Importantly, their characterization attended to there being a certain number of positions
for specific outcomes, and the number of options per position decreases with each successive
position choice. This suggests that their understanding of n! was informed by their applica-
tion of positional reasoning to structure the specific combinatorial process they
described above.
In constructing this characterization, they extended the mental act of arranging from specific
instantiations to account for any collection of n objects. Through relating, the students attended
to the regularity in their arrangements via progressively filling slots to construct outcomes in
Group 1, and they delineated arrangements from sub–arrangements in Group 2. The students
then extended this envisioned arranging activity to be applied to any “given number of ele-
ments”, thus expanding the range of applicability of this coordinated mental act. Moreover,
through delineating Group 1 from Group 2, they extended those specific mental acts corre-
sponding to a complete arrangement of objects, carrying out a constructive process regulated by
their positional reasoning. We include this detailed analysis as an example of the specific reflec-
tions the students enacted on their initial activity in response to relating and extending, as well
as the regulatory nature of their engagement in positional reasoning. As an additional note, we
comment on Sanjeev’s use of “spots” language and his implicit reference to building out an out-
come based on the process he described. Generally, we would not consider the use of slots,
spots, or positions alone as being clear indicators of a set–oriented perspective, as, in our expe-
riences, students may use such language to convey multiple steps in a process or stages in an
26 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
operation, which may or may not be linked to outcomes. However, because we can analyze
other work by Sanjeev, we have prior evidence of his understanding that such a process gener-
ates outcomes. We thus consider Sanjeev to be demonstrating engagement in a set–oriented
perspective here.
The underlined portion of the excerpt shows that the distinction the students established when
relating was being extended to the general setting. The students’ positional reasoning informed
this distinction, and their extending resulted in an understanding rooted in their arranging of a
given number of objects into various slots. We infer that the students were envisioning similar
constructive processes as in Group 1, but with the key distinctions they outlined, because of their
associations of Group 2 with Group 1. In this way, we again see that the boundaries between the
categories that the students had established in the relating phase afforded an opportunity for
them to attend to the specific construction of the outcome of a permutation process.
Sanjeev’s comments below also suggest that they engaged in an equivalence way of thinking to
regulate their generalizing. For the formula of Group 2, the students wrote the formula in Figure
5, which Sanjeev explained as follows.
Sanjeev: So, you have your total number of elements that you can arrange into a certain number of places.
And then you have a certain number of places that you care about. And so, if you have a certain number of
elements, and you have a certain number of places that you care about, then you want to take the number
of elements minus the number of places you care about to get the result of places you don’t care about.
And then you divide out the number of places you don’t care about.
We note that for this formula, they communicated that division eliminated the “places you
don’t care about.” This use of division allowed them to focus on just some (but not all) of the
positions, which they viewed as a key distinguishing feature of this problem type. Their com-
ments suggest that their appeals to equivalence when defining the boundaries of the groups
became an integral component of the way they understood the general permutation formula and
its corresponding problem type. Thus, while extending the students not only leveraged their
equivalence way of thinking, but also formalized the conditions under which they could more
generally employ equivalence in counting. Again, we see that extending further elicited engage-
ment in the students’ ways of thinking to refine their understandings of the problem types and
general formulas.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 27
Selection (Group 3)
The articulation of combinations seemed to be a bit more difficult for the students to reason
about, but they ultimately used particular outcomes to clarify that in this set of problems they
did not want to count 3, 2, 1 as the same as 1, 2, 3. The students extended the distinctions they
had previously made in the categorization phase. Rose discussed how these problems in Group 3
related to problems in Group 2.
Rose: – I’m saying that this [Group 3] is the same as number [Group] 2 except you’re getting rid of all the
repeated sequences.
Sanjeev: So, we could say how many ways to arrange a given number of elements into a given number
of spots.
Rose: Without reusing any elements, and technically to get rid of the amount of repetition you can just
divide by the factorial of how many spots you have. Because that – because the factorial of 4 spots is 24,
and you’re going to have 24 sequences that are the same.
Sanjeev: Uh–huh (in the affirmative).
Rose: So, for 3 I can just write like dot, dot – [ … ]
To characterize the Group 3 problems, the students attended to a previously constructed rela-
tionship between Groups 2 and 3 that had been identified when relating. In addition to distin-
guishing between permutation and combination problems via equivalence, the students also
viewed the combination formula as an extension of the process they had carried out in solving
permutations. Indeed, notably their description of combinations continued from the Group 2
characterization (as indicated an arrow in Figure 6). After some discussion, they settled on the
final articulation “ … and divide by the factorial of the given spots to delete repeated sequences
because any arrangement of the ne ! same given elements is considered the same combination,” and
they wrote the final formula ðnenns !s Þ! : The students clarified that ne was the number of elements and
ns was the number of spots. We see their final statement of justification as the actual articulation
of the problem type for Group 3.
Their exchange demonstrates how they were reasoning about the formula.
Rose: The third one starts off pretty much the same [as Group 2]. You want to figure out how many objects you
can put into how many spots, when the number of spots is less than the number of objects. So, it starts out with
the same formula, except this time we have to get rid of the duplicates, because 1, 2, 3 is the same as 3, 2, 1.
Sanjeev: So, let’s start with that. So, we have the number of elements that you can completely arrange, and
you divide out the number of elements you’re going to want to not focus on. So, it’s going to be the total
minus the number you do want to focus on. And then you have – you have some result of arrangements.
But now within each of those arrangements that you’re now focusing on, you want to divide out the
number of duplicates.
Rose: Yeah.
28 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
Sanjeev: So, in – in this case you’re assuming that within each of those arrangements every single one of
those arrangements is the same. So now you have like a subset of your arrangements. And in that subset
every single one of them is the same, so you want to divide it again.
Interviewer: Okay.
Sanjeev: So you take this, and you divide that out by –
Rose: I’d say it’s ns factorial.
Sanjeev: Factorial.
Rose: Because that’s the number of spots you have, and if you have 4 elements going into the same 4 spots
you’re going to get n factorial duplicates out of that.
In this exchange we see that the students conceived of solving these Group 3 combination
problems as first counting arrangements (Group 2), and then dividing out to account for dupli-
cates (see the underlined portion above). They seemed to understand that the need to account for
possible duplicates differentiated these problems from arrangements, and they understood the
role that division played in accounting for duplicates. This further highlights the utility of the
comparing and contrasting they engaged in while relating, in that restating the refined boundaries
between the groups allowed them to coordinate and articulate a productive way of distinguishing
combinations upon construction of the general problem type.
We maintain that the students’ use of their own notation and language suggests that they were
developing personal understandings of the formula and articulating a formula that they could
understand. This is natural given that they had no knowledge of the combination formula prior
to this experiment. Further, we also suggest that attending to the set of outcomes provided a
meaningful distinction between combinations and permutations, and they leveraged equivalence
to achieve division that accounted for the duplicates.
In this instance, the students extended the notion of accounting for “duplicates” when order-
ings of the elements in the final outcome were inconsequential. The characterization the students
put forth was a formal articulation of the means by which they differentiated between Groups 2
and 3 in the categorization phase. This again underscores ways in which the students’ engage-
ment in the generalizing actions of relating and extending were supported by the developing
ways of thinking from their initial activity.
Here Rose demonstrated positional reasoning. Note that in Rose’s first line, she was engaging
in relating by comparing Group 4 with Groups 1–3, and she contrasted the problem with a
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 29
problem involving factorial, explaining how in this situation the number of options would not
decrease. We additionally point out that both students arrived at the formula and discussed its
form (Rose noted, “instead of factorial, we’re going to raise it to the power of something”) but
they understood exponentiation not just as some figurative formula but as representing the multi-
plicative process supported by positional reasoning.
Thus, we contend that Rose’s articulation of their formula reflected the combinatorial activity
from which it was extended, and it also suggested engagement in positional reasoning. More spe-
cifically, the students’ descriptions of the Group 4 problems are indicative of the same mental
acts used for iterative–outcome construction in which they had engaged during their initial activ-
ity. While engaging in relating and extending, the students isolated the particularly meaningful
characteristics of their arrangement activity and then broadened the applicability of those isolated
mental acts.
unique feature of these students’ reflection on activity is the interdependencies of the students’
understandings of each problem type in their constructive process. Specifically, whereas other
reflection on activity might more specifically feature reflection on regularities of singular mental
acts in isolated iterative stages, the students’ reflection on activity specifically featured the estab-
lishing of barriers between different types of mental acts as a core feature of their reflection. We
elaborate this point in the discussion.
Finally, the students engaged in specific combinatorial ways of thinking in each phase, which
highlights a novel synergy between ways of thinking and generalizing actions as together contri-
buting to the students’ refined ways of understanding the final problem types and general count-
ing formulas. By explicitly leveraging generalizing actions in this way, we have detailed the kinds
of ways of thinking that helped students articulate problem types and produce these formulas.
This detailed account of their generalizations allows us to identify the ways the students under-
stood the counting formulas and allows us to attribute their understandings of the general formu-
las to the ways that they engaged in initial activity, the developing ways of thinking implemented
in generalization, and the ways in which their generalizing activity both elicited and drew from
their engagement in those ways of thinking.
Anne–Marie: So, with these ones [refers to Group 1], they’re all arrangement problems. So, how many ways
can you arrange a number of unique characters?
Aaron: One is used up and then it’s kind of a matter of slots just finding how many unique ones can
go inside?
Carson: Right, it’s dependent events. So, what you have for the second depends on what you get for
the first.
Josh: I see it as having a limited amount of slots and a limited amount of objects that you can put into
those slots.
Carson: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean these ones [refers to Group 1] are unique from the other arrangement ones
that we have [refers to Group 2] in that all of the slots are filled.
…
[On how to describe the problem type]
Anne–Marie: How many unique arrangements?
Aaron: Mm–hmm.
Carson: Yeah, how many arrangements of a given set of unique objects.
…
Josh: Well, given x number of objects, you can arrange them in x! number of ways.
The students here described a process of filling slots such that the slot choices depend on pre-
vious choices. Their utterances are consistent with an understanding that the process of filling in
slots yields an arrangement of objects, and that x! enumerates the result of the slot–fill-
ing process.
Similar to their characterization of Group 1, the students wrote “Independent events with
given number of outcomes” for their characterization of Group 4, and “ab , a ¼ possibilities of
each choice, b ¼ total # of choices you make”. Their discussion focused on the lack of depend-
ence between the steps of the outcome construction.
Carson: Independent events.
Aaron: So, it doesn’t matter that you’re repeating an element more than once.
Carson: For an outcome.
Aaron: Yeah.
Anne–Marie: Your options are not reduced every time?
Carson: Right.
Anne–Marie: So, you have a consistent number of multiplication.
Carson: Right.
…
[On how to describe the problem type]
Carson: Trials?
Josh: I would see it as you’re making a certain number of choices. You have a certain number of possibilities for
each choice.
Carson: Right.
Josh: So, it would be the number of possibilities that you have for each choice raised to the power of how
many choices you’re making.
Carson: Right.
32 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
The students’ language while determining and describing their characterizations of Groups 1
and 4 display what we observed to be their consistent engagement in positional reasoning, specif-
ically their continued counting throughout the experiment via outcome–organization into slots.
After the first two problems in the initial activity phase, the students frequently phrased novel
counting problems in terms of a number of available “slots” (or “spots”), how many options were
available to fill those “slots”, and whether or not the sequence of choices affected subsequent
“slot” options. Moreover, the students consistently organized representative outcomes according
to a spot–based representation throughout the initial activity phase. Much like the PTE, we inter-
preted the SGTE students’ consistent use of a partial outcome construction and appeal to sequen-
tial slot–filling enumeration strategies as evidence of their engagement in mental actions
consistent with positional reasoning.
During categorization, Carson described the sequential filling of slots as contrasting
“dependent” versus “independent” events, particularly when sorting the problems and describing
the differences between categories. The other students then later adopted this language in the
characterization phase to convey the distinctions Carson drew out in categorization. We observed
that the students’ utterances during characterization were consistent with the mental activity we
were inferring from their work throughout the experiment. As such, we contend that the stu-
dents’ understandings of these two groups were the culmination of their reflection on the slot–-
filling activity that they had engaged in for the vast majority of the counting problems in the
initial activity, then made distinct via relating due to the “dependent” and “independent” con-
straints on the slot–filling process.
We interpret that the students understood the combinatorial products of Group 2 as similar to
Group 1, but distinct in that the number of desired objects arranged could be chosen from a total
amount of objects. The students’ first comments highlight attention to a difference between the
number of slots filled and the presented number of objects. The students’ language of “selection
from arrangement” conveys this emphasis on varying the desired number of slots to be filled after
arranging the total number of objects. We infer from their language that the students’ under-
standings were supported by their consistent reasoning with equivalence, of which we observed
first during the latter half of the initial activity phase.
The students then described the differences between Group 3 and the previous groups by say-
ing “arrangement does not matter, divide out duplicates” and “similar to 2”, with a formula
a!
ðabÞ!b! , where a and b are assumed to have the same meaning as their counterparts in Group 2.
Describing this group, the students said the following:
Carson: So, the same as above [Group 2], with another caveat that some of the elements are–
Josh: Arrangement doesn’t matter.
Carson: Right, that arrangement doesn’t matter.
Josh: It’s the same thing [as Group 2] except the order in which you pick them doesn’t matter.
Anne–Marie: Arrangement, yeah, without order.
…
Josh: Yeah, I think that you’re also going to – it’s basically this [Group 2] except you’re also dividing by the
number of things that you’re picking from because order doesn’t matter.
…
Aaron: You’re trying to get rid of all the combinations that you’re not looking for that you can make out of
those three slots because they’re all the same. So, that just accounts for that.
As with the students in the PTE, we see these students making explicit connections between
permutations and combinations, not just in the formulas but in the combinatorial operations that
the formulas represent. The students’ repeated attention to outcome ordering conveys that they
found relevant whether or not the result of an enacted counting process was an ordered arrange-
ment or an unordered grouping. Further, the students’ language conveys attention to the division
of the b! as a means of accounting for this ordering by removing the “same” outcomes, from
which we infer influence of an equivalence way of thinking.
The students’ utterances describing Groups 2 and 3 were consistent with the terminology of
“duplicates” and “getting rid of” unwanted slots or outcomes that the students adopted at the end
of the first session, and they continued to employ such language through the rest of the initial
activity phase and throughout the categorization phase. In particular, while solving the Horse
Race Problem, the students first recognized that while all of the horses in the race could be
ranked, different arrangements of the non–medal winners would result in “duplicates” of the
same three winning horses. After a lengthy discussion of whether subtraction or division was
the appropriate way to account for the duplicates, the students agreed that division would create
the single representative outcome from the “duplicates” of what they wanted to count. Following
this first discussion, the students would identify when there was an abundance of “unwanted”
slots, and they would engage in division to “get rid of duplicate” arrangements that they “were
not looking for”.
Anne–Marie then described that they needed to “add another layer” when duplicate outcomes
could be generated when the ordering of outcomes did not matter. The students then intention-
ally described whether the problems that they were solving asked for “unique” outcomes, or
whether orderings would create “duplicate” outcomes, all while attending to how many “slots”
the problem asked for and making sure to remove the unwanted slots. The students’ habitual
34 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
attention to the duplication of desired outcomes, and subsequent division to eliminate the dupli-
cates is consistent with the mental actions we associate with an equivalence way of thinking.
Moreover, this language continued in their categorization of the problems, wherein multiple times
the students made distinct those problems involving “divid[ing]” to “cancel out the duplicates”
from others lacking this solution feature. Moreover, as seen in their language for the Group 3
characterization, the students also refined the boundary between duplication due to an abundance
of “wanted slots” and duplication because of outcome ordering. As such, engagement in an
equivalence way of thinking supported the students’ solving of novel counting problems, their
establishing of relationships and boundaries between problems, and their determining of the fea-
tures of the Group 2 and 3 problem types.
In sum, we contend that the same emergent theoretical constructs from the PTE can serve as
explanatory mechanisms for the SGTE students’ counting and generalizing activity.
to attend to the particular features of their activity that made the counting problems and formu-
las meaningful. Thus, we would contend that the establishing of relationships is a key component
of relating that we drew from heavily, but that in some instances it was productive for the stu-
dents to also establish the relationships by attending to the differences between the problems
and contexts.
We feel that our study also highlights the need for further examination of the combinatorial
ways of thinking we identified in this study. While the set–oriented perspective has been previ-
ously identified in the literature as a productive combinatorial way of thinking (Lockwood, 2014),
we see a need for additional investigation of the equivalence and positional ways of thinking.
Lockwood and Reed (2020) elaborated the subtleties of an equivalence way of thinking, but we
posit that there is more work to be done exploring ways that equivalence can be leveraged as a
productive way of thinking across mathematical domains. Additionally, further exploration into
the broader impacts of all of these ways of thinking in students’ combinatorial reasoning is war-
ranted, specifically outside of the context of the Categorization Task and these basic count-
ing formulas.
Future directions
We conclude with some general comments on directions for further research. We note that both
groups categorized and characterized problems similarly to each other, and thus we get little
insight into what might occur if students were to start with a different way of categorizing prob-
lems. We think that instances of student generalization that differ from the described mental acts
of the students in this study would be interesting and insightful, both from a combinatorial and a
generalization perspective. We frame this as an avenue for future research and suggest that it
would be helpful to investigate what other kinds of categorizations students would identify among
the problem set we gave our students.
Further, we primarily worked with relatively strong students – vector calculus assumes a certain
level of mathematical maturity experience. It also suggests (as noted previously) that we were con-
ceiving of working with students who, as vector calculus students, could eventually see combinatorics
in an introduction to proof class. There are also opportunities for students with less mathematical
experience (who may not be math majors) to engage with combinatorics – often there are introduc-
tory discrete mathematics classes for computer science students, for example. Working with students
who have less mathematical experience would be interesting, potentially as a way to observe alterna-
tive ways of categorizing. If other student groups recreate the results of this study, then that would
be informative, but it would also be useful to see other kinds of aspects of the problems they might
attend to. Thus, working with students such as college algebra, precalculus, or introductory computer
science students could be a worthwhile avenue to pursue.
A natural next step for future research will be to explore the effectiveness of the Categorization
Activity as an instructional intervention. Researchers could investigate the possibility of adapting the
Categorization Activity in an instructional setting, either a classroom or a small group setting. For
instance, it might be useful to understand potential issues that could arise due to the constraints of
implementing this activity with multiple groups. We would want to better understand how some-
thing like the Categorization Activity could scale and what instructors would need to do to imple-
ment it in whole–class environments. This highlights that an eventual extension of this research
would be to develop materials that extend the Categorization Activity for use in classrooms that
teach combinatorics – this could be in introductory discrete mathematics, discrete mathematics,
introduction to proof, combinatorics, or even probability courses.
Finally, as discussed above, other potential future projects could entail examining other ways
that the generalizing activities in the R–F–E framework can be leveraged in instruction. By speci-
fying the students’ mechanisms of reflection through relating and then extending, we were able to
document the factors influencing the students’ reflections when generalizing in greater detail than
has been done before. Future studies can examine similar ways to structure students’ learning by
employing constructs from the generalization literature.
COGNITION AND INSTRUCTION 39
Funding
This material is based in part upon work supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1419973.
ORCID
Zackery Reed http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6956-8903
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Appendix
Selection Interview Tasks
1. Demographic questions
a. Which math classes did you take in high school? Which math classes have you taken at the college
level? Did you take any statistics, probability, or computer science classes?
b. What is your major?
c. What year are you in school?
2. Have you seen any of the following symbols? If so, can you describe what you think it means, and where
you have seen it before?
a. nCr or Cðn, rÞ
b. A B
n
3. (c)
r
a. P nPr or Pðn, rÞ
b. 1k10 k
4. A Domino is a small, thin rectangular tile that has dots on one of its broad faces. That face is split into two
halves, and there can be 0 through 6 dots on each of those halves. Suppose you want to make a set of domi-
nos (i.e., include every possible domino). How many distinguishable dominos would you make for a com-
plete set?
5. How many ways are there to flip a coin, roll a dice, and pick a card from a standard deck?
42 Z. REED AND E. LOCKWOOD
6. There are 4 different Russian books, 3 different Spanish books, and 5 different French books. You want to
pick a pair of books that are not of the same language. How many ways are there to do this?
7. How many ways are there to arrange 5 different pictures in a row on a wall?
8. Suppose there are 6 athletes competing in an event at the Olympics. How many different possible results are
there for who wins the gold, silver, and bronze medals?
9. You have 8 different books on your shelf, and you want to take 3 with you on vacation. In how many ways
can you choose 3 books to take with you?
10. There is a 5–question multiple choice quiz with possible answers A, B, and C. How many possibilities are
there for how to complete this quiz?
11. How many ways are there to arrange the letters in the word CATTLE so that the two Ts are together either
at the beginning or the end of the word?
12. A password consists of 8 upper–case letters. How many passwords contain at least 3 Es?