Student's Strategic Competence toward Open-Ended Problems before and after the Transition to Junior High School

Abstract

Strategic competence refers to mental activities that apply strategies to formulate, to represent, and to solve mathematical problems. The aim of this qualitative research is to explore strategic competence of the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students in solving open-ended problems. There were 25 students with different mathematical competencies involved to take part in this research. Among them, three selected students with higher mathematical competency represented each grade. This research used interview-based task to explore students' strategic competence. Results showed that students understood the problems by reading and drawing/graphing them, formulated problem solving by recalling their prior knowledge about quadrilateral topic, and conveyed numerical and visual strategy to solve the open-ended problems. At last, they could determine effective solutions using arithmetical method, find all solutions correctly, and choose the cheaper ones. As an implication, we suggest further research to explore students' strategic competence with other types of mathematical competences.