ABSTRACT
This research is motivated by the low spatial sense ability of elementary school students in West Java, Indonesia. Meanwhile, the education curriculum in Indonesia requires elementary school students to have geometric abilities. Geometry abilities are closely related to students' mastery of spatial sense ability. The present study aimed to investigate the enhancement of elementary school students’ spatial sense ability through the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract approach, seen from Mathematical Prior Ability and as a whole. It is a quasi-experiment with pre-test and post-test control group design in Mathematics in the topic of 3 dimension geometry (3D geometry) involving 131 elementary school students in Subang and Karawang, West Java, Indonesia. The present study is conducted by using two study groups; a group that implements a concrete pictorial abstract learning approach as the experimental group and group which implements conventional learning as the control group. Both descriptive and inferential data analysis show that students with concrete pictorial abstract learning approaches have better spatial sense ability enhancement rather than students with conventional learning, seen as a whole and in every mathematical prior ability. The results showed that the highest enhancement in spatial sense ability of elementary school students was in the group of students with low mathematical prior ability, followed by the group of high mathematical prior ability, and the lowest enhancement in spatial sense ability of elementary school students was in the group of students with middle mathematical prior ability. Therefore, concrete pictorial abstract learning can improve elementary school students’ spatial sense ability, especially for students with low mathematical prior ability.
KEYWORDS
spatial sense ability, concrete-pictorial-abstract (CPA) approach, elementary school students