Strategies Of Students In Completing Cross-Section Task Of Mathematics Spatial Visualization

Abstract

Spatial visualization required so a person's thoughts can be communicated to others. The purpose of this study is to describe the strategies students in completing the task of determining the geometrical cross section cut by one plane. The subjects of this study are five students in the fifth grade of elementary school. These students are required to predict the two dimensional cross-section when a simple geometric solid is sliced by a cutting plane. There are three simple geometric solid, namely spheres, cones and cylinders. The results showed that the emerging strategy is imagistic and analytic strategies. Imagistic strategy refers to (1) encoding the spatial characteristics of an object such as shape, position and orientation in the field of cutting, (2) students imagine slicing object and mentally moving it to focus on a form field pieces and (3) represents a cross section geometrical of the object cut through orthogonal orientation based on their position on the surface of the cut. The analytic strategy is characterized by comparing two stimuli, such as comparing the shape of a circle with a pad on a cone.