The effects of augmented reality representations on student’s’ understanding on learning fraction

Representations have been widely used in STEM education due to their effectiveness to transform abstract concepts into concrete ideas. However, the use of representations does not necessarily mean that students could fully comprehend the teaching materials given. Furthermore, according to TIMSS 2015, students in this country showed low level of motivation in leaning math. What they have learned in class tends to be not relevant to their daily lives. Some math teachers reported that majority of students are suffered from learning fraction due to a lack of contextual linkages. We proposed a study that assumes the functionality of augmented reality (AR) may better make such links. With the use of AR that augments graphical representations on concepts of fractions into the real objects, the learning effects could be significantly improved. The proposed AR-represented instructions may help students be able to overlay carefully designed representations of abstract concepts onto real-life images. We planned to create an App that allows students to go through a three-step process to experience a mixed-reality environment on learning fractions. In order to verify our assumption, a quasi-experiment will be conducted with 80 3th-grade students. AR-represented instruction will be embedded in experimental group, while the pictorial instruction will be performed in control group. In summary, this AR-represented instruction aims at tackling with the misconceptions that students are often suffered in learning fractions, by displaying augmented virtual overlays on real objects. Both student’s representational fluency as well as their conceptual/procedural understanding of learning contents will be examined.