Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine an effective teaching method for two strategies, the "Finding a Pattern"strategy and "Consider Simpler Cases"strategy.Subjects were 138 elementary school fifth graders.The teaching contens and the number of lessons differed between the five classes.The main difference in the teaching plan was whether solving an appication problem was included or not.The performances of pretests and posttests of pattern finding problems was compared.The results revealed that it is necessary to teach the application of both strategies to solve generalizing problems.This result suggests that it is important for students to learn when to use these strategies through solving application problems.
