Analysis of Students’ Visual, Symbolic, and Verbal Representations as Indicators of Mathematical Representation Ability in a Quadratic Function Test

Abstract

This study aims to analyze students’ visual, symbolic, and verbal representations as indicators of mathematical representation ability in solving a quadratic function test. The study employed a descriptive quantitative approach with a cross-sectional design. The research subjects consisted of 127 tenth-grade students from three senior high schools who had studied quadratic functions. Data were collected through an essay test consisting of six items to measure the indicators of visual, symbolic, and verbal representation. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics through answer scoring, score grouping based on representation indicators, and conversion into percentage form. The results showed that students’ mathematical representation ability was still relatively low and had not developed evenly, with visual representation achieving the highest percentage at 36.68%, followed by verbal representation at 13.92%, while symbolic representation was the lowest indicator at 10.02%. The findings also showed that students already possessed basic abilities in familiar problems, but still experienced difficulties when they had to interpret graphs, understand function notation, connect different representations, and relate quadratic functions to other topics such as function transformations. These difficulties indicate that students’ understanding still tends to be partial and procedural, so that conceptual connections among representations have not been formed as a whole. Thus, the teaching of quadratic functions needs to be designed in a more balanced way by emphasizing conceptual understanding, the interconnection among representations, and the development of students’ mathematical argumentation.