UNIVERSITY STUDENTS VISUAL AND ANALYTIC STRATEGIES


Saglam Y., BÜLBÜL A.

HACETTEPE UNIVERSITESI EGITIM FAKULTESI DERGISI-HACETTEPE UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, sa.43, ss.398-409, 2012 (SSCI) identifier identifier

Özet

The aim of this study is to investigate how university students provide the connection between the visual and analytic thinking strategies during the problem solving process in integral, and to examine the changes the teaching experiment creates in their visual preferences, which is realized in order to enable them to use the visual strategy more effectively and by relating it to the analytical process. In this study teaching experiment which is a qualitative research method was used and the participants of the study are six preservice mathematics teachers. The visual preferences of the participants were identified with Mathematical Processing Instrument. The teaching experiment was designed with six nonvisual participants during the four weeks time period. Before and after the teaching experiment, clinical interviews were conducted to identify the change of visual preference of participants. As a result of the study, different reasons for the preference of participants' analytical strategies over visual ones were identified. Some of these reasons for this preference are that analytical methods are more commonly used methods at problem solving than visual methods and lecturer gives emphasis mostly on analytical strategies. Consequently, analytical features of some mathematical concepts are better known than the visual features of these concepts by the participants. The teaching experiment was observed to result in different preference changes in participants. This difference among the participants can be partially explained by the difference of their mathematical beliefs gained through previous learning experiences.