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Representative Images
Although many mathematical manipulatives are used as tangible objects for children to hold and interact with, virtual manipulatives, also known as online representational images, are also used in educational settings. Representational images refer to an image that accurately represents symbols in written text and have been shown to help elementary school children understand mathematical problems. Unlike manipulatives, representational images cannot be interacted with through touch since they are often presented either on paper or on a computer screen that children can only observe.

There are different types of representational images, some which accurately reflect the objects in a given problem, and some which are considered to be more neutral, like rectangle and circles that aim to simulate geometric manipulatives of counting sticks and chips. Students have been shown to have more success solving mathematical problems when the representational images mimicked the object in the problem, like a picture of a balloon in a problem that talked about a circus.

Representational images are valuable for children’s learning since it helps identify different components of a written problem to better understand it. These images aid students to cognitively map words within a problem to a symbol that they have previously seen or currently see in their environment. Once the written text is paired with something familiar, the student has the ability to understand the context with more ease, which has been shown to lead to more success when solving mathematical problems. Oppositely, an image that is not representative of a word problem does not help student’s comprehension.