The article deals with issues concerning the abductive-inductive reasoning of 42 preservice elementary majors on patterns that consist of figural and numerical cues. We discuss: ways in which the participants develop generalizations about classes of abstract objects; abductive processes they exhibit which support their induction leading to a generalization; ways they justify their generalizations in the abductive stage, and; the effects of figural and numerical cues in the manner they construct a plausible abductive generalization. Two types of abductions are explored, model-based and manipulative. A proposed abductive-inductive reasoning process for pattern sequences is presented and discussed in the concluding section.