EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLES ON MATHEMATIC’S LEARNING IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: A STUDY ON THE OPERATIONS OF INTEGER MATERIAL

Abstrak / Ringkasan

As a lesson considered as a difficult lesson, many factors affect learning opbstacles in learning mathematics. Learning obstacles could be experienced by the students with different levels of ability. The most common factor that causes learning difficulties is the lack of teacher’s ability to manage learning process and apply a suitable methodology. For example, the teacher goes directly to a new material regardless the prior knowledge of students. Moreover, in applying the learning plans, the teacher are less considering the variety of the students’ responses on the developed didactic situation. As a result, the students give no response at all since the students’ responses are beyond the teacher’s ability. This paper focused on the student's epistemological obstacle on the operations of integer material in grade seventh.
From the results of the survey in class VII at two Junior High School in the city of Palembang on the operations of integer, epistemological obstacles occured in understanding the concept of integer operations. Students understood in concept of addition and subtraction, but not able to apply to the problem, especially on addition and subtraction that involving positive and negative integers all at once. The forms of a + (-b), -b + a, and a - (-b) are still difficult to be solved by the students. Based on the analysis of epistemological obstacle against their answers, students seemed not to understand the meaning of negative numbers as a abstract numbers in their minds. Consequently, integer applications problem cannot be solved properly by most students.

Key words: Learning Obstacles, epistemological obstacles, operations of integer

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