• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.171-189
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• 2017

By designing and applying the lesson helping to discover the power laws, we tried to investigate the characteristics on the class. To do this, we designed a discovery lesson on the power laws and applied to 54 8th grade students. As results, we could observe the overproduction of monotonous laws, tendency to vary the type of development and increase error to students without prior learning experience, and various errors. All participants failed to express the generalization of $a^m{\div}a^n$ and some participants expressed an incomplete generalization using variables partially for the base or power. We could also observe an error of limited generality or a representation error which did not use the equal sign or variables. In the survey of students, there were two contradictory positions to appeal to the enjoyment of the creation and to talk about the difficulty of creation. Based on such results, we discussed the pedagogical implications relating to the discovery of power laws.