Teachers also serve as monitors of students' developing facility with reasoning. In order to use inductive reasoning appropriately, students need to know its limitations as well as its possibilities. Because many elementary and middle-grades tasks rely on inductive reasoning, teachers should be aware that students might develop an incorrect expectation that patterns always generalize in ways that would be expected on the basis of the regularities found in the first few terms. The following hypothetical example shows how a » teacher could help students develop a healthy appreciation for the power and limits of inductive reasoning.