Cognitive Activity: How It Affected by Visual Reading Strategies and MbL for Students Learning Benefit?
Aisyah Zumira (a*), Rini Solihat (b)

a) Biology Education, School of Postgraduates, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia
*aisyahzumira[at]gmail.com
b) Biology Education Department, Faculty of Mathematics and Science Education, Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Bandung, Indonesia

Abstract

Many of biology lessons content is abstract. Pictures, diagrams, and models are some examples of visual representations used by teachers as teaching strategies. Representations facilitate both of teacher and students in learning process. For teacher, representations help teacher in knowledge transfer process. As for students, representation makes it easier for them to understand the content and reduces the possibility of misconceptions. Several studies show that students^ visual representation skills are still very low. The ability of visual representation can be seen from the cognitive activity that appears in the process of understanding the information in the form of a given visualization. The low ability of students^ visual representation is influenced by the lack of use of visual reading strategies which also affect students^ cognitive activities. Another thing that can affect students^ cognitive activity is the use of modeling based learning (MbL). Then, this study purpose was to determine the effect and relationship between visual reading strategies and MbL on cognitive activities in biology learning process. There are fifteen scientific article from the last ten years publications used in this study from credible journal in biology education. The results of this review indicate that visual reading strategies and the use of MbL effect on students^ cognitive activities when studying biology learning content. For example, reduced students^ misconceptions after the use of visual representations and MbL. Therefore, the results of this review can be an input for biology teachers to improve the learning process and maximize students^ learning outcomes in the future.

Keywords: Cognitive activity- visual representations- modeling based learning- biology learning process

Topic: Biology Education