2018 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 125-137
The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between diagram-drawing skills in the field of physics and mental imagery ability and to examine the effective learning strategies for students who are not good at mental imagery processing to acquire high drawing skills. The participants were first grade upper secondary school students (n=80). Results of the analysis showed that the spatial controllability of mental imagery had a significant effect on both diagram-drawing skills, “visualization” (a process of drawing physical phenomena from sentence information) and “physics description” (a process of drawing physical information such as vector information and numerical information). In addition, it was revealed that visualization skills tended to be higher when a linguistic encoding strategy was used in the group with low spatial controllability, and the physics depiction skill tended to be higher for the students who used an organizational strategy. In conclusion, mental imagery ability is a variable that explains the individual differences in the diagram-drawing skills. However, even if the students are not good at spatial controllability of the mental imagery, diagram-drawing skills can be fostered by adaptive learning strategies.
