Parallelism and transversals in geometry: Experiences of fresh senior high school graduates into teacher education

This study was set up to investigate the newly admitted senior high school graduates’ geometric representation of corresponding and alternate angles in contexts where parallel and non-parallel lines are cut by a transversal. The study also examined their reasoning about parallelism. 25 volunteers, through a pilot study, responded to a series of geometric tasks meant to assess geometry reasoning and understanding. This study reports on the data dealing with the afore-mentioned concepts.
The findings indicate that: the participants were more able to identify geometric representation of alternate angles (64%) than they were with corresponding angles (44%); participants’ written narratives demonstrated evidence of imprecision in their reasoning about parallelism; and most participants showed limited knowledge and use of necessary keywords to justify parallelism. The findings suggest participants showed diverse conceptual understanding of alternate and corresponding angles and demonstrate insufficient and ‘suspended’ knowledge of parallelism.