Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Diagrams are a potentially valuable tool for helping students understand mathematical concepts and procedures. Onetype of diagram that is sometimes used to depict mathematical relationships is tape diagrams, which depict quantitiesin continuous strips. This study investigated whether tape diagrams with different visual features differentially supportreasoning about equations, and explored whether people have preferences for tape diagrams with different visual features.Undergraduates (N = 50) were asked (1) to generate equations to correspond with tape diagrams with varying visualfeatures, and (2) to select the diagram they preferred from pairs that differed in visual features. Variations in visualfeatures (color, presence of outer lines, and position of the constant) did not affect participants success at generatingequations to correspond to the tape diagrams. However, participants displayed systematic preferences for most visualfeatures considered. Future research should examine the effects of these visual features on performance while solvingequations.