Teacher's best practice for theoretical thinking - the case of commutativity

We present the results of a long-term teaching practice aimed at favouring theoretical thinking in primary school pupils. Our research question is to assess whether this practice achieves pupils’ good results in this way of thinking. We focus on the operations commutative property as a detector of forms of generalization. The minutes of a 4th graders arithmetic activity show that teacher’s methodology gave children the opportunity to express their different points of view about generalization