Investigation On Spatial Reasoning Of Junior Middle School Students

Spatial reasoning is considered as an important component of science,technology,engineering and mathematics.Spatial reasoning ability is not only related to STEM learning,but also closely related to many other subjects."compulsory Education Mathematics Curriculum Standard(2001Edition)"(hereinafter referred to as the curriculum standard)points out that in mathematics teaching,students should develop number sense,symbol consciousness,spatial concept,geometric intuition,data analysis concept,operation ability,reasoning ability and model thinking.It can be seen that spatial reasoning ability is also the key requirement of the curriculum standard.On this basis,according to Ajay Ramful's division of spatial reasoning structure,the author compiled a test involving psychological rotation and spatial visualization,tested 469 students in grade 1 and grade2 in B city,divided the thinking level of students,and analyzed the current situation of junior high school students' spatial reasoning ability.This study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.The main research problems are as follows:(1)Grade differences in junior high school students' spatial reasoning ability?(2)Gender differences in junior high school students' spatial reasoning ability?(3)What are the cognitive characteristics of junior high school students' spatial reasoning process?It is found that there is no significant difference between grade and gender in spatial reasoning ability of mental rotation ability.There are grade and gender differences in spatial visualization ability in spatial reasoning ability.Grade two students are slightly higher than grade one students,while boys are slightly better at spatial visualization than girls.In the aspect of rotation strategy,the subjects consider focusing on the part,whole or a certain point on the object to be rotated,and may skip the rotation angle and direction twice during rotation.The number of rotations,whether the object has a slope,and whether the students pay attention to the locality but neglect the whole are the three major difficulties affecting the successful psychological rotation of students.On the whole,students' spatial visualization ability is unbalanced,and the overall ability is low.More than half of the subjects can only determine the position of the surface when operating visual objects,but cannot determine the position and shape at the same time,that is,they can only complete one level of tasks,and difficulties will arise when both of them are needed.According to the research results,this paper puts forward some teaching suggestions to cultivate students' spatial reasoning ability: For students who have difficulty in recognizing image position or shape,implement targeted teaching;Training "unconventional" problems can increase the working memory capacity of students in visual space.