An Analysis of Students’ Error in Solving Abstract Algebra Tasks

Abstract

This research aimed at determining student errors in completing abstract algebra tasks. This study can be catagorized as descriptive research involving 31 college students of mathematics education program as research participant, Riau Kepulauan University, Batam. The research instrument used 4 essays of abstract algebra tests. The students’ errors were identified and categorized into 3 types of errors namely, careless errors, computational errors, and conceptual errors. The result of this study showed that most of the students’ errors was on conceptual error with the percentage of 57.94% and followed by the careless error with 33.33%, and the computational error was 8.73%. The analysis results based on the student ability level, it was found that the high competence students mostly conducting careless error and followed by conceptual error, and computational error. Meanwhile the moderate and low competence students, mostly doing conceptual error that followed by careless error, and computational error. Also, based on the proportion of errors, the high performance students made careless error and computational error more than the students with moderate and low performance. Moreover, in case of conceptual error, the pattern was the opposite where students with moderate and lower performance conducted conceptual errors more than high performance students.