{"title":"Metacognitive awareness and visualisation in the imagination: The case of the invisible circles","authors":"D. Jagals, Martha Van der Walt","doi":"10.4102/PYTHAGORAS.V39I1.396","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Awareness of one’s own strengths and weaknesses during visualisation is often initiated by the imagination – the faculty for intuitively visualising and modelling an object. Towards exploring the role of metacognitive awareness and imagination in facilitating visualisation in solving a mathematics task, four secondary schools in the North West province of South Africa were selected for instrumental case studies. Understanding how mathematical objects are modelled in the mind may explain the transfer of the mathematical ideas between metacognitive awareness and the rigour of the imaginer’s mental images. From each school, a top achiever in mathematics was invited to an individual interview (n = 4) and was video-recorded while solving a mathematics word problem. Participants also had to identify metacognitive statements from a sample of statement cards (n = 15) which provided them the necessary vocabulary to express their thinking during the interview. During their attempts, participants were asked questions about what they were thinking, what they did and why they did what they had done. Analysis with a priori coding suggests the three types of imagination consistent with the metacognitive awareness and visualisation include initiating, conceiving and transformative imaginations. These results indicate the tenets by which metacognitive awareness and visualisation are conceptually related with the imagination as a faculty of self-directedness. Based on these findings, a renewed understanding of the role of metacognition and imagination in mathematics tasks is revealed and discussed in terms of the tenets of metacognitive awareness and imagination. These tenets advance the rational debate about mathematics to promote a more imaginative mathematics.","PeriodicalId":43521,"journal":{"name":"Pythagoras","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2018-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.4102/PYTHAGORAS.V39I1.396","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Pythagoras","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.4102/PYTHAGORAS.V39I1.396","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"EDUCATION, SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
Awareness of one’s own strengths and weaknesses during visualisation is often initiated by the imagination – the faculty for intuitively visualising and modelling an object. Towards exploring the role of metacognitive awareness and imagination in facilitating visualisation in solving a mathematics task, four secondary schools in the North West province of South Africa were selected for instrumental case studies. Understanding how mathematical objects are modelled in the mind may explain the transfer of the mathematical ideas between metacognitive awareness and the rigour of the imaginer’s mental images. From each school, a top achiever in mathematics was invited to an individual interview (n = 4) and was video-recorded while solving a mathematics word problem. Participants also had to identify metacognitive statements from a sample of statement cards (n = 15) which provided them the necessary vocabulary to express their thinking during the interview. During their attempts, participants were asked questions about what they were thinking, what they did and why they did what they had done. Analysis with a priori coding suggests the three types of imagination consistent with the metacognitive awareness and visualisation include initiating, conceiving and transformative imaginations. These results indicate the tenets by which metacognitive awareness and visualisation are conceptually related with the imagination as a faculty of self-directedness. Based on these findings, a renewed understanding of the role of metacognition and imagination in mathematics tasks is revealed and discussed in terms of the tenets of metacognitive awareness and imagination. These tenets advance the rational debate about mathematics to promote a more imaginative mathematics.
期刊介绍:
Pythagoras is a scholarly research journal that provides a forum for the presentation and critical discussion of current research and developments in mathematics education at both national and international level. Pythagoras publishes articles that significantly contribute to our understanding of mathematics teaching, learning and curriculum studies, including reports of research (experiments, case studies, surveys, philosophical and historical studies, etc.), critical analyses of school mathematics curricular and teacher development initiatives, literature reviews, theoretical analyses, exposition of mathematical thinking (mathematical practices) and commentaries on issues relating to the teaching and learning of mathematics at all levels of education.