Students mental manipulation of a shape at the early educational level

In this article we present results of research aiming at describing the strategies used by 10-year-old children while solving one geometric task. The research was lead through three different stages. In May 2015 the Educational Research Institute in Poland carried out a survey titled Competences Of Third Grades. One task, related to the domain "the geometric imagination", solved by 199 361 students, achieved a low degree of solvability, also among students achieving good results in other educational domains. To identify the strategy for solving this task, about 3000 submitted solutions were reviewed. One of them was based on imagination of action. We were interested to which extent such dynamic thinking is present in children's solutions, therefore, in the next stage, individual observations of a child working on this task were carried out. 35 children aged 10 years participated in this stage. The results of all stages are briefly presented in this study, with particular attention to the result of the third stage. This last stage supports our opinion that dynamic reasoning is possible to trigger, but requires special teaching methodology and specially designed tasks.