Using visualisation to teach grade 12 heights and distances: A study in one secondary school in Zululand district of KwaZulu-Natal province

Abstract

Visualisation has been widely used to enhance learners’ conceptual understanding of problem solving in mathematics. The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of visualisation in teaching and learning heights and distances in Grade 12 learners and to determine how visualisation may influence learners’ understanding and performance when solving height and distance problems. This study adopted a mixed-methods approach, utilising both quantitative and qualitative methods. A pre-test-intervention-post-test design was employed to assess the effectiveness of visualisation in teaching heights and distances in trigonometry. A pre-test and post-test were administered to 60 Grade 12 learners, divided into experimental and control groups. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the two teachers from the experimental and control groups, along with lesson observations before, during, and after the intervention. Thematic analysis was applied to analyse the semi-structured interviews and the lesson observation data. The researcher utilised Excel and SPSS tools for statistical data analysis. Microsoft Excel was used to record pre- and post-test scores for the experimental and control group results. This study proposed potential methods for using visualisation to teach and learn about heights and distances in trigonometry. The findings revealed that, prior to the intervention, the control group outperformed the experimental group in most questions on the pre-test. Following the intervention, learners' performance in the experimental group improved, resulting in better outcomes than the control group in the post-test. This indicates that the implementation of visualisation positively impacted the performance of the experimental group.