Abstract: This paper reports an investigation of 127 secondary school students’ ability to recognize patterns and make generalized descriptions of them. Two spatial patterning tasks were presented in either concrete or diagrammatic formats and the students were able to use concrete, diagrammatic or verbal formats to represent them. The SOLO Taxonomy (Biggs & Collis, 1982, 1991) was used to classify the students’ generalizations. Analysis identified a progression in the students’ ability to recognize generalizations from their representations of spatial patterns with fits the SOLO model. These were predominantly consistent with Biggs’ and Collis’ (1982, 1991) description of the ikonic mode, with some concrete symbolic support. Regardless of the SOLO level of their generalizations, the majority of the students chose to use block to model at least the fifth step of the pattern before they moved to working from an internal representation. Drawing diagrammatic representations was not a very frequent choice.