Do Math Diagrams Matter?

     Almost everyone has been in a math class where the teacher or professor has warned the class about the picture or diagram on a certain problem is not drawn to scale properly. For me, these problems mess with my head because I use visual aids to check if my answer makes sense. At the same time when doing problems such as those I look around the room and it seems many students could care less about the picture. After these observations, I wondered if diagrams make a difference for students in the classroom and why textbooks cannot have better pictures with the technology we have today.  

    When I started looking for information on this topic, I found that the use of proper diagrams in the math classroom is an understudied topic, and most of the articles you can find will tell you that. The article that aligned most with what I have observed is linked below the blog. This article talks about how all students, whether they have a learning disability or not, learn math in different ways. The focus of the article is on how students use diagrams and if they are helpful, whether they are making them or using one given to them. As one could guess, diagrams help students more than they probably realize. The part that I found interesting is that students seem to struggle if a diagram does not match what they have found. This is largely impart to figure #1 in the article (Sorry it would not post on the blog) that talks about strands of diagram proficiency. In one of the boxes for example it says one should be able to explain and justify how a diagram helped in a problem. If the diagram is not correct, how are we supposed to justify or explain how it helped solve the problem.  

    It is interesting that false diagrams occur with all the available technology. Technology has improved over the last decade, and there are several software programs capable of drawing diagrams for use. Over the past couple of semesters, I have been able to mess around with a website called GeoGebra. GeoGebra can construct just about any polygon or even polyhedron a teacher or textbook writer could ever want. Websites like this should be used to help students learn and understand. Whether that is having students do problems on those sites or the teacher taking the time to make a diagram that properly fits the questions. For more information on the impact of diagrams on student learning in mathematics, please see the article below. 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11858-013-0519-1