Students’ use of technological tools for verification purposes in geometry problem solving

Despite its importance in mathematical problem solving, verification receives rather little attention by the students in classrooms, especially at the primary school level. Under the hypotheses that (a) non-standard tasks create a feeling of uncertainty that stimulates the students to proceed to verification processes and (b) computational environments – by providing more available tools compared to the traditional environment – might offer opportunities for more frequent usage of verification techniques, we posed to 5th and 6th graders non-routine problems dealing with area of plane irregular figures. The data collected gave us evidence that computational environments allow the development of verification processes in a wider variety compared to the traditional paper-and-pencil environment and at the same time we had the chance to propose a preliminary categorization of the students’ verification processes under certain conditions.