An analysis of proportional reasoning ability of junior high school students

Abstract

This study aims to describe proportional reasoning skills and students’ difficul­ties in solving proportional reasoning problems. The population of this research was 3480 seventh-grade students of state junior high schools in the Yogyakarta region. The samples were 158 students chosen using proportionate stratified random sampling that represent four categories of school (very high, high, me­dium, low) based on the average scores of the national examination in mathe­matics in 2016. Data were collected through essay tests and interviews. Data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The result showed that the stu­dents in very high and high category schools had moderate proportional rea­soning ability. Students in medium and low category schools had low propor­tional reasoning ability. Students’ difficulties in solving proportional reasoning problems vary based on the type of the problem, such as the difficulty in finding the multiplicative relationship contained in the problem, the difficulty in under­standing the value of inverse proportion, and the difficulty in explaining the obtained solution of the problems.