Muhammad Reyza Arief Taqwa, Handy Faishal Rahim
This study aims to compare students' abilities in understanding vector topics in two representations, namely visual and mathematical. This is a comparative research. Data were collected by survey. The research was conducted on 191 first-year undergraduate students of physics and physics education. The research instrument consisted of 14 multiple choice questions (7 questions of mathematical representation and 7 questions of verbal representation). Data analysis was performed by determining descriptive statistics and paired sample t-test. The results showed that the students' ability to understand vector concepts with mathematical representations was better than those in verbal representations. Students' mean score in verbal and mathematical representation formats are 33.91 and 59.17. Based on the results of the paired sample t-test obtained t = -12.96 and sig. = 0.00. These results indicate that the students' ability to understand vector concepts in verbal and mathematical representation formats is significantly different. This study's results came that students' understanding of vector concepts still depends on the representation of the questions because their understanding is not coherent. Based on these findings, vector learning should be focused on the meaning of vectors in various representations, and connecting the meanings of vector operations in various representations, not only on mathematics. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.
Department of Physics, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universitas Negeri Malang, Semarang Street No. 5, Malang, 65145, Indonesia