Preservice teachers’ use of representations and visual-spatial abilities in problem solving

This study aimed to investigate preservice teachers’ use of representations, visual-spatial abilities, and their relationships with word problem solving performances. The sample of the study consisted of 113 preservice mathematics teachers in a private and four public universities. The results showed that there was no significant relationship between problem solving performance and visual-spatial abilities. Preservice teachers’ visual-spatial abilities only had a weak relationship with use of schematic representations among all the variables. While most of the solutions including schematic representations were correct, more than half of the solutions involving pictorial representations were incorrect. The findings suggested that the influence of representations on performance significantly differed in terms of the types of representations and visual-spatial abilities did not have an influence on preferences for problem solving methods. Preservice teachers’ learning experiences and aims for easy and quick solutions could be more decisive in their use of representations