Thinking Habit 08

Examine Patterns
and Relationships

Identify patterns, connections, and relationships within and across ideas, systems, or information.

Driving question

What patterns or connections do I notice, and what might they mean?

Teacher prompts

  • What repeats, changes, or varies together?
  • Which details or cases do not fit the pattern?
  • How are these parts connected?
  • Does the information show a relationship, or establish a cause?

What students do

  • Organize observations or information so comparisons are possible.
  • Identify repetition, variation, connections, or relationships.
  • Check patterns against exceptions and additional cases.
  • Interpret what the relationship may mean without claiming more than the information supports.

See the habit in the work

A student notices a trend in a small data set. Examining the relationship includes checking an exception and distinguishing an association from a cause.

Illustrative classroom example · Mathematics · Reading paired data

Draft

More practice always causes a higher score.

The information available

In this fictional data set, five students report 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 minutes of practice. Their corresponding scores are 5, 7, 6, 8, and 9 out of 10.

The scores generally rise with practice time, but not at every step. These observations alone do not isolate the effect of practice.

Draft

More practice always causes a higher score.

Teacher feedback

Compare each pair of values. Does every increase in practice time come with a higher score? What can this small data set tell you about a cause?

The teacher asks the student to examine both the overall pattern and the case that does not fit a simple rule.

Draft

More practice always causes a higher score.

Revised

In these five cases, scores generally increase with reported practice time. However, the student reporting 30 minutes scored lower than the one reporting 20. The pattern does not by itself establish that practice caused the difference.

What changed: The student described an overall relationship, identified an exception, and removed an unsupported causal claim.

Try it in class

Pattern, exception, interpretation

  1. Ask students to organize a small set of observations, examples, or data so they can compare them.
  2. Have them describe a pattern or connection and identify any cases that do not fit.
  3. Ask what the pattern suggests, what it does not establish, and what additional information would help interpret it.

Make the relationship visible

Have students record or mark the compared information, describe the relationship, note an exception, and state a cautious interpretation.

Look for a pattern grounded in the information. Connections can be temporal, structural, conceptual, or numerical; an apparent relationship is not automatically a causal explanation.