Teaching for Understanding Mathematics in Primary School

Abstract

Conceptual understanding is one indicator of an expert in mathematics. Conceptual understanding is important for students in addition to procedural skills. Students who have a good conceptual understanding will be able to find solutions with new or different procedures, while students who do not have conceptual understanding will only use standard procedures. Teaching is the most important thing in the process of developing students conceptual understanding. The teacher as a learning designer in the classroom has a role that must be able to direct and guide students to develop conceptual understanding through effective learning. This article aims to discuss the teaching of conceptual understanding in primary schools. This article uses a structured literature review method. The author uses various documents such as national and international indexed journals, quality books that have been written by mathematical figures, especially material on understanding mathematics concepts and teaching. The results showed that the teacher could teach conceptual understanding by using the teaching language carefully and easily understood, making questions that encouraged students to think, avoiding learning shortcuts, avoiding memorizing facts and procedures, helping students make connections between concepts, and develop understanding through CRA (Concrete-Representation-Abstract).