A Narrative Inquiry Study of Relational Thinking of Junior High School Students
Lia Ardiansari, Didi Suryadi, Dadan Dasari
UPI
Abstract
Relational thinking involves understanding equality and numerical relationships, thus encouraging students to reflect on the numerical relationship between structurally similar expressions promising a smooth transition from arithmetic to algebra. The distributive property provides a means of the equal sign to connect two operations, such as addition and multiplication in any field. Therefore, the distributive property is used in this study to investigate the type of familiarity with the nature of this operation so that it can be a promotion of flexibility in thinking that can lead to algebraic thinking. This study aims to investigate ways of thinking, learning, and experiences that are understood narratively. A Narrative inquiry highlights the problem and forms a new theoretical understanding of ones experience. Data was collected by distributing questionnaires and semi-structured interviews to participants as many as 53 junior high school students where 45% were male students and 55% were female students selected using purposive sampling technique. The results of the study show that generally junior high school students still have a weak understanding of the same relationship in distributive property described by the word "operational" which is a contrasting understanding with the relational viewpoint.
Keywords: algebraic thinking, distributive property, equal sign, narrative inquiry, relational thinking
Topic: Mathematics Education