Applying Mamdani’s method to categorize mathematical literacy of public middle school students in Kupang

Abstract

The study objective was to describe the application of Mamdani’s fuzzy inference method to the categorization of public middle school students’ mathematical literacy in Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara. Having been done not only because of the low achievement of Indonesian 15-year-old students in PISA, but the research has also become the answer to the lack of surveys regarding students’ mathematical literacy in Kupang. Consequently, this study provides valid and actual data that the government should refer to. As many as 377 respondents of ninth-grade students from public schools were selected using a two-stage cluster randomized sampling so that they could best represent six districts in Kupang. Their ability was evaluated by fifteen math literacy problems adopted from PISA 2012 and the products of some development research; as a result, the reliability could be assured. At the fuzzification stage, scores obtained from three process domains of math literacy: formulating, employing, and interpreting, became the crisp input since those domains were the input variables. After being analyzed, the scores then produced crisp output indicating student mathematical literacy–as the output variable–at the defuzzification stage. Overall, public middle school students’ mathematical literacy in Kupang was classified as a low group.