Chapter 6: South African Students’ Anchoring Strategies in Geometrical Reflections

The purpose of this research is to describe the anchoring strategies students use to reflect images in transformation geometry and to investigate the success of the strategies. To achieve this, an explanatory framework has been developed from the work of Clement (1993), Lakoff and Nunez (1997), and situated learning theory. The research was conducted with seventhand eighth-grade students in urban schools in South Africa. The results show that students were more likely to rely on action rather than analogical anchors in undertaking the task. The most advantageous strategies were paper folding and turning the figure to realign the axis of symmetry.