Characteristics of Combinatorial Thinking and its Place in School Mathematics Curriculum

Combinatorics has not had a real place in mathematics curriculum of many educational systems and this situation is still a case in those systems. However، by the major reform of the secondary education in Iran that started in 1992، combinatorics became one of the mathematics subjects of high school. In specific، one of the four chapters of “discrete mathematics” textbook is devoted to combinatorics. Further، this topic has been used as a mean to identify students'' special talents in creative mathematical problem solving and sifting them through for IMO and other mathematics contest given that students could choose different strategies to solve similar combinatorial problems and counting per se. The chief reason is that combinatorial problems do not need much prior subject matter knowledge as opposed to many other mathematical subjects such as analysis and differential equations. Because of the new direction in mathematics curriculum and the importance of combinatorial thinking in school mathematics، the present study aimed to shed more lights into the nature of combinatorial thinking using metaanalysis as the research methodology.