Proceedings of the International Conference on Research in Education, Teaching and Learning.
Year: 2018 | Page No:59-67
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/ICETL.2018.11.85
Teaching Mathematics through Images: The Importance of Visuality in University Coursebooks
Nárcisz Kulcsár
ABSTRACT:
Visuality intertwines all areas of life, our brain needs to process a wide range of visual stimuli. Physiological processes in the brain (myelination process) cause that adolescence and young adults learn typically differently. Therefore to help them better comprehend difficult subjects, visual aids need to be utilized.
These reasons lead us to pay more attention in higher education on visuality. The preferable ration between text and images in the textbooks should be between 30 and 50 % but the question is that what shows the reality. Miguel de Guzman, a Spanish mathematician dealt with visuality in mathematics. He distinguished four different types of visualization in mathematics due to the strength of relation between the object and its visual mapping. Based on the theoretical background some mathematics coursebooks for engineers were investigated that students use currently or used in our or in other universities in Hungary. Some comparisons were made from a visual point of view based on Guzman’s theory and on other visual aspects. These findings contributed to develop a new mathematics coursebook in our university in which visual elements got more attention.