Evaluation on the quality of education in Malaysia is assessed mainly through written examinations. Both the Malaysian Education Development Plan for 2001-2010 and 2013-2025 outlined restructuring of the Integrated Secondary School Curriculum (KBSM) with one of the aims to enhance students_ critical and creative thinking which could be achieved through the imperative visual reasoning skills in mathematics education specifically in the solving of mathematical problems. This study presents the analysis on the roles of graphical tasks, which are visual in nature, in the mathematics papers, Mathematics and Additional Mathematics, of the main Malaysian national examination, the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia, with the visual reasoning demand as the point of focus. A quantitative analysis is carried out on the role of graphics: decorative, representational, organizational or informational, and the trend in topics with graphic-accompanied tasks. In addition, the level of visual reasoning demand by .....

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The importance of understanding graph in the learning of calculus had led to calls for an increased in visual reasoning skills among secondary through university levels. The effectiveness of graphs in understanding derivatives depends on their efficacy as visual text forms aimed to illustrate and communicate two or more related information. Providing students with an approach to reading and interpreting graphs will help them to understand concepts better. Therefore, the study focussed on how to assess 194 pre-university students_ ability to read and interpret graphical form of functions and their derivatives based on the decoding theory: reading the graph, reading between the graph and reading beyond the graph. Findings indicate that students were able to read information directly but faced difficulties when reading beyond the graph. Implications and future research directions are discussed. Keywords Assessing, visual reasoning, derivative, graphical approach...

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