Rather than relying on memorised formulas, students need to examine visual or logical relationships and determine the rule connecting them.

Ezyxam’s HAST abstract reasoning practice provides students with opportunities to develop this type of thinking online.

A useful approach is to break each question into observations.

Ask:

What changes?

What remains constant?

Is the change based on position, shape, number, direction or sequence?

Can the proposed rule explain every example?

This prevents students from choosing an answer based purely on visual intuition.

Reviewing mistakes is equally important.

When a question is answered incorrectly, students should explain the rule they initially believed was operating and then compare it with the correct relationship.

This develops metacognition—the ability to understand and evaluate one's own reasoning process.

As students improve, practice can become more complex and eventually timed.

The objective is to build flexible reasoning skills that transfer to unfamiliar problems.

Want to test your abstract reasoning? Start Ezyxam’s HAST abstract reasoning practice online and challenge yourself with unfamiliar patterns and relationships.