Mathematical and Mental Rotation Skill in Internal Representation of Elementary Students

Abstract

In this article, we review how the mental rotation of students in their internal representation and what is mathematic skill they used. Researchers found three geometry problems in elementary schools in Kediri Indonesia. Students have difficulty to make a cube net from the cube and they have opinion that to make a cube they need parallelogram and square. It is a big problem in geometry to transform 2 dimensional objects to 3 dimensional objects and vice versa. Based on the geometry problem of student in Kediri Indonesia, the researcher gives them a cube to modify as a cube net. Internal process is activities in their mind that they used for make a transformation an object into another object. The form of an object is different in this case 3 dimensional object into 2 dimensional object. They used mental rotation in transformation process. This article describes process mental rotation and mathematic skill student that they used to transform 3 dimensional object to 2 dimensional object. The result shown that encoding of features, imagined angular stimuli rotations and fast stimulus matching are they used in mental rotation processes and they used symbolic number sense, ordinal magnitude sense and line sub division are they used in mathematic skill.