Students' challenges with the figural concepts in geometry

Geometry is one of the most challenging math courses that has attracted the attention of many math educators from past to present. Understanding geometric figures plays a crucial role in understanding school geometry. Different geometric figures can be seen everywhere in geometry textbooks, and it can be said that recognizing and relating to geometric figures is an important part of the geometry learning process. But research results and teachers' experience show that students face many difficulties in understanding these figures and in understanding figural concepts in general, which is a major obstacle to their geometric reasoning. The purpose of this article, which is done in a library method, is to describe some of these difficulties based on valid research. Many students guess the name of geometric figures only according to their appearance and are not familiar with the main features of each of these figures and rely only on their previous intuitions and experiences in recognizing geometric figures and tend to ignore the definition. Discussions on such topics will raise teachers' awareness of students' learning difficulties, as well as review the process of teaching geometry and improve teaching methods.