Born from the research of the Stanford Professor of Mathematics and author of Mathematical Mindsets Jo Boaler, Visual Mathematics is the set of tools and opportunities to visualize math concepts, helping build solid mathematical foundations.

Recent studies have found that learning at its best happens when we engage different parts of our brain. This implies that whenever students use symbols in place of numbers, they are making use of a different section in their brain unrelated to those sections used for recognizing visual information like squares, cubes, etc. The major finding from the research was that students could improve their math performance drastically including numerical math if they are been taught the subject visually.

I looked up for videos that explained concepts using visual mathematics. I will focus my discussion on this video: Link to video

The video explains the area of a circle in relation to the area of a triangle and the area of a rectangle. I had never been explained the concept of area in this manner and it helped me understand the relationship better. However, along with visuals, the video also used speech, sound, words and animation tools. This further enhanced the understanding compared to using only visuals or words.

This is an example of multimodal learning applied to Visual Mathematics.

References:

https://www.youcubed.org/resource/visual-mathematics/

https://blog.byjus.com/visual-math-improves-math-performance/

https://mashupmath.com/blog/2017/3/10/jo-boaler-suggests-these-awesome-visual-math-activities

Park, J., & Brannon, E. M. (2013). Training the Approximate Number System Improves Math Proficiency. Psychological Science, 24(10), 2013–2019