Open-mindedness of pre-service mathematics teachers in problem solving

Abstract

When someone responds to a problem, open-mindedness behavior is needed. The effort to familiarize and develop open-mindedness in pre-service mathematics teacher is to do problem solving activities. This research aims to investigate the problem solving process of pre-service mathematics teachers related to open-mindedness. The stage of the problem-solving process is to determine a problem with no specified universal set. The participants were ten open-minded Mathematics Education students at Khairun University. This type of research is a descriptive qualitative approach. The research stages consisted of, 1) give problems, observe, and record the behavior of participants during problem solving, 2) analyze the answer sheet, 3) doing triangulation through interviews, and 4) summarize the tendencies of open-mindedness pre-service mathematics teachers in problem solving. The results showed that when participants solve problems with no specified universal set, they tend to assume that the completeness of the information from the questions has been fulfilled so that they proceed to problem solving. However, during the interview and given a room for discussion between the participants, they consciously realized that there were many solutions or even had no solutions depending on the problems given. Therefore, the open-mindedness of pre-service mathematics teachers in problem solving is largely determined by the existence of a discussion process.