Probabilistic Thinking Ability of Students Viewed from Their Field Independent and Field Dependent Cognitive Style

Abstract

The aims of this research are to study: (1) probabilistic thinking ability of mathematics education students, (2) classification of the students’ cognitive style, (3) levelling of the students’ probabilistic thinking ability viewed from their cognitive styles. This research used the qualitative descriptive method and involved 74 subjects. The measured subjects were Group 1 with “fixed FD” classification consisted of 7 students, Group 2 with “mobile FD and mobile FI” classification consisted of 9 students, and Group 3 with “fixed FI” classification consisted of 5 students. The classification of cognitive styles into three groups revealed that there was suitability between cognitive style and probabilistic thinking ability from low to high level. These results could be analysed from the classification of cognitive style and an average of their value of probabilistic thinking ability. The average of probabilistic thinking ability of Group 1 was 42.58; the average of probabilistic thinking ability of Group 2 was 54.44, and the average of probabilistic thinking ability of Group 3 was 68.6. Group 1 and 3 had small standard deviation for the value of probabilistic thinking ability, respectively are 11.36 and 12.30. Thus the data was relatively homogeneous. Meanwhile, Group 2 had a huge standard deviation for the value of probabilistic thinking ability, namely 19.36 which means that the data was relatively heterogeneous. Most of the probabilistic thinking ability level for Group 1 and 2 was Level 2, which is Transitional level, while the most of the probabilistic thinking ability level for Group 3 was Level 4, which is Numeric level.