Characteristics of Prospective Student Teacher’s Representation in Solving Ill-Well Algebraic Problems

Abstract

Mathematical representation is an important aspect of mathematical problem-solving. But prospective student teachers’ ability of a mathematical representation in ill-structured problem solving is still very limited compared to that in well-structured problem-solving. However, ill-structured problems supported mathematical abstraction used in mathematical concept understanding. This study described the characteristics of prospective student teachers’ representations and translation among representation in ill-structured and well-structured social algebraic problem-solving. Thirty Indonesian prospective students teachers have to solve the ill-well algebraic problems by using think-aloud while recorded using a video recorder and the researchers observed by writing on a field note to record the important events. Data were analyzed using a comparative method so that it was obtained the different characteristics of representations between solving ill-structured and well-structured problems. The result showed that verbal and symbolic representations used by subjects to compute, detect and correct an error, and justify their answers in ill-structured problem solving but visual representation only used by the first subject to detect and correct error. The subjects lack to uncover necessary information to solve the ill-Structured problem compared to that of a well-structured problem. It means that representation is important to be studied further because it affected to ill-structured problem ability.