Comparison of training effects in imagery strategies of mental imagery of think-aloud of written representation and motor representation on the performance of elementary students in solving verbal math problems

The purpose of the present study was to compare the effect of training the strategies of mental imagery, think-aloud, written representation and motor representation on the performance of the fifth grade male elementary students in solving verbal math problems. For this purpose, using random cluster sampling, two elementary male schools were selected from the third educational district in Isfahan. Each of these elementary schools had two fifth grade classes (n = 108). 75 students were randomly divided into five fifteen-member groups consisted of mental imagery group, think-aloud group, written representation group, motor representation group and control group. All the students of five groups were given a pretest consisted of 12 verbal math problems and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM). No significant difference was observed between the mean scores gained by the students of five groups on the pretest and Raven's intelligence test. Each of the experimental groups received 10 forty five-minute training sessions. The control group received no instruction. After completion of training sessions, all of the students took the verbal math problems posttest, which was parallel with the pretest. The one- way analysis of variance on the differences among the student's scores on the pretest and the posttest showed significant differences of the groups. Tukey follow-up test was used to compare the paired group means. The students of written representation group and mental imagery group showed better performance on the posttest in comparison with the control group. The results indicated that written representation and mental imagery methods have a positive impact on the students’ performance in verbal math problem solving.