Representation is one of the fundamental abilities of mathematics reflected by students understanding of mathematics concepts, principles, or procedures, so it becomes crucial for teachers to develop students' mathematical representation skills. This research was time to describe the representation used in the problem and the level of mathematical representation ability needed to solve mathematical literacy problems. The data was collected through the assignment to design mathematical literacy problems between 3-10 pieces and interview as triangulation on 35 prospective elementary school teacher students. The data are grouped based on various representations and analyzed quantitatively and descriptively. Then one problem is chosen randomly for each type of representation to describe the level of representation ability needed to solve the problem qualitatively. The results show that the mathematical representations used in designed mathematical literacy problems are pictorial-verbal, pictorial-symbolic, verbal-symbolic, pictorial, verbal, symbolic, and pictorial-verbal-symbolic representations. The level of representational ability that tends to be needed to solve problems is levels 0 and 1. This study suggests that prospective teacher students should develop mathematical representation knowledge to improve the quality of their learning in the future
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