Mathematical Connection of Prospective Mathematics Teachers in Constructing Graph-Based Real-life Problem

Abstract

Mathematical connection ability is one of the important abilities that students should have. Connecting real-world problems to mathematical concepts can make learning mathematics more meaningful for students. In everyday life, there is a lot of information presented in graphs. Graphing competence consists of graph interpretation and graph construction. Even though graph construction is a crucial yet neglected skill. From the previous explanation, the purpose of this study is to describe the ability of students to construct a graph based on a real-life problem. This descriptive qualitative study is collected from 37 prospective mathematics teachers in a university. All students had to answer one question about constructing a graph based on a real-life situation given. The result of this study, students’ mathematical connection between everyday life and mathematics itself was still low. Using indicators in this study: 10.81% of the students could not represent the real-life situation in the graph that they constructed; 75.68% of the students made graphs but many features of the graphs did not represent the situation well; and 13.51% of the students made more representing graph but some features of the graph did not relevant. Therefore, in mathematics learning the teacher should give more experience to the students to explore everyday life situations using mathematics and encourage students to write their thoughts down so that mathematics becomes meaningful for students. Keywords: constructing graph-based real-life problem, mathematical connection, prospective mathematics teachers