2025 Volume 49 Issue 1 Pages 40-57
Given the difficulties pupils encounter with analogies that require adaptation, the purpose of this study was to clarify some aspects of adaptation by re-representation in junior high school students. The research framework by Yan et al. (2003) was adopted for identifying opportunities and methods of re-representation to analyse how junior high school students engage in problem solving by analogy. The analysis examined the transformation of representations yielded by re-representation and its role in facilitating adaptation. The results indicate that, among the opportunities and methods outlined by Yan et al. (2003), the opportunities ‘Gulches’ and ‘Rivals’ emerged, with students employing ‘Decomposition’ and ‘Entity collecting’ as methods to resolve them. As an aspect of this process, we clarified the identity of the elements and relations that map onto each other through re-presentation, and revealed the students’ adaptation to adjust the content of the map to satisfy this identity. Therefore, it is considered that if students are encouraged to reflect on the solution of the base problem and to rethink it from a different point of view, their adaptation through re-representation can be promoted.
