DIAGNOSING STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN SOLVING MATHEMATICAL WORD PROBLEM

Abstract

The factors causing students' learning difficulties are very diverse, namely cognitive, non-cognitive factors, physical, mental, health, learning environment, teacher's personality, social-culture, economic background of students and schools as educational institutions. Therefore, teachers need to diagnose students' learning difficulties in order to overcome these difficulties. The purpose of this research is to 1) describe students’ difficulties in solving word problem related to the quadratic inequalities; 2) diagnose the cause of these student difficulties. This study is descriptive-qualitative research design. In this case, the researcher is the primary instrument. In collecting the data, the researcher used a diagnostic test sheet, interview and field notes. In this study, triangulation of data source is applied to check the validity of the data. Result of diagnostic test shows that student difficulties are: (a) not identify the problem, (b) not written the information into mathematical model, (c) did not know/forgot the concept of word problem that is GLBB and total revenue, (d) have not been able to make quadratic inequalities, and e) have not been able to determine its solution set. Diagnosis in this research using mapping mathematics, that is a diagram that arrange based on student difficulties. Its research shows that the causes are reading related error, linguistic error, error in understanding inequalities concepts, and error in arithmetic process. The source of causes are students’ cognitive and non-cognitive factors and also pedagogical factors