Akbar Sutawidjaja

The Thinking Process of Students in Representing Images to Symbols in Fractions

Thinking is the development of ideas and concepts within a person caused by the process of establishing relationships between parts of the information stored in a person. In the early stages, the object of thought is accepted by the senses, processed in the brain into concepts / ideas, and expressed into a representation. Elementary students who are generally in a concrete operational stage desperately need this representation to facilitate their understanding. This research is a qualitative research with the subject of 12 students grouped into 3 groups, namely: (1) group representation in the usual way; (2) representation group with percent; (3) representation group by degrees. This research is intended to describe the thinking process of students in representing images to symbols on fractional materials. The results show that the representations of these three groups are essentially similar. All of them follow the APOS process (action, process, object and schema). The difference only occurs in group 1, where group 1 tends to think procedurally, while groups 2 and 3 think analytically.