Junior high school students’ mathematical connection: a comparative study of children who have reflective and impulsive cognitive styles

Abstract

Mathematical connections are the link between mathematical topics and mathematics, with other disciplines and to the real world or in daily life. The purpose of this study was to describe the mathematical connection ability of junior high school children who have impulsive and reflective cognitive styles. To achieve that objective, comparative research is done both qualitatively and quantitatively between reflective and impulsive students. The research subjects were students of SMP Negeri 1 Palang who had impulsive and reflective cognitive styles. To measure impulsive and reflective cognitive styles the MFFT (Matching Familiar Figures Test) instrument is used. The mathematical connection instrument is a mathematical connection test while exploring the mathematical connection skills used by task-based interviews. Based on the results of the qualitative analysis, it was concluded that reflective students can recognize and use the relationship between ideas in mathematics better than impulsive students. Reflective students are also able to show quite well how mathematical ideas are interconnected and build on each other to produce a coherent whole, but impulsive students are less able. On indicators of recognizing and applying mathematics in contexts outside mathematics, both reflective and impulsive children have the same difficulty. The results of the statistical analysis of the mathematical connection score, there were no significant differences between reflective and impulsive students.