The Exploring of Visual Imagery: In their Relation to the Students’ Mathematical Identity

Abstract

The learning principles usually not visually. The visual understood as an analytical and facilitate an idea. That is the visual is parallel to other representation. The visual ability is not only a tool, or a strategy, or a type of thinking, but also the chain of reasoning to achieve the formal analytic abilities. In this study, the visual ability examined, as a strategy or way of thinking to solve a problem. The question to be addressed is: How do students come to their mathematics identities based on visual imagery? The research conducted at classes of the preservice mathematics education students namely provides evidence for what is their identity relative to their experiences. The results conducted based on explorative studies for the visual abilities. The performance obtained during the teaching and learning, i.e., visualizing and answering analytically or visually, manipulating and answering analytically or visually or by formulas, and visualizing and the answering visually or analytically or based on the conditions. The performance linked to the visual representation and related to intuition underlies formal abilities. The visual perceptions disturbed by prior knowledge, and the level based on optical illusions, so the teaching and learning make a difference between potential and abilities. The analytical affects visual perception and the belief system, so difficult to construct knowledge. However, the level of thinking is different, i.e., not yet formal or new optical illusion. The visual model related to high-level thinking, which distinguished from the analytical thinking model. In the visual model, thinking activities based on the transformations and understood as the other operations in mathematics. The visual model also shows the analytic thinking and hierarchical. The visual and the analytical thinking integrated to develop a richer understanding of mathematical concepts. Through visual thinking, the mental processing was constructed and interpreted as mental objects and processed analytically. The next, exhibits the analytical, consist of the construction process from the visual, namely the reflective abstractions. The visual abilities not related to the duration of courses in the mathematics education department. The longer increases the analytic but in contrary to the visual. Through the learning of the visual abilities, the difficulties in solving the problems decrease, but resistant to the analytic show a specific performance. Visual learning reveals a hierarchical level of the thinking, so the best performance is the highest learning ability. When learning the visual abilities given, the performance increases.