Fragmentation of the Thinking Structure of Translation in Solving Mathematical Modelling Problems

Abstract

Fragmentation of the thinking structure is the process of construction of information in the brain that is inefficient, incomplete, and not interconnected, and hinders the process of mathematical problem solving. In solving mathematical modeling problems, students need to do translation thinking which is useful for changing the initial representation (source representation) into a new representation (target representation). This study aims to discover how the occurrence of the fragmentation of the thinking structure of translation within students in their solving of mathematical modeling problems. The method used is descriptive qualitative with the instrument in the form of one question for the mathematical modeling of necklace pendants and semi-structured interview sheets. The results showed that there were three errors that occurred in solving mathematical modeling problems. First, the error in changing a verbal representation to a graph. Secondly, errors in changing a graphical representation to symbols (algebraic form). Thirdly, errors in changing graphical representation and symbols into mathematical models. The three errors that occur are described based on the four categories of Bosse frameworks (Bosse, et al., 2014), namely: (1) unpacking the source (UtS), (2) preliminary coordination (PC), (3) constructing the target (CtT), and (4) determining equivalence (DE). In this study, there were 3 subjects who experienced fragmentation of the thinking structure in solving mathematical modeling problems. One of the highlights is the fragmentation of the structure of translation thinking often starts from the process of unpacking of the source due to the incompleteness of considering all the available source details.