Critical Thinking Processes of Junior High School Students in Solving Contextual Problems of Direct and Inverse Proportions Based on Reflective-Impulsive Style

Abstract

Abstract

Critical thinking is one of essential components in mathematics learning and its process becomes the focus to improve students’ critical thinking. In mathematics instruction, mathematics cannot be separated from problem solving, and critical thinking helps them in such a thing. Contextual problem is one of various problems which is related to context in a real life and can be found easily in topic direct-inverse proportions. This kind of problem gives opportunity to think more critically to find the solutions. When solving problems, students proceed information differently and it is affected by their cognitive style. One-dimensional model of variation in cognitive style is reflective-impulsive style. The purpose of this research is to describe the critical thinking processes of reflective and impulsive junior-high-school-students in solving contextual problems of direct and inverse proportions. This research is descriptive qualitative research; using test and interview methods to collect the data. The results showed that both students with reflective and impulsive style did all the phases in critical thinking proposed by Facione. Yet, there are some differencess on how they go through each of thoses phases: (1) both students conduct interpretation by categorizing what are given and asked, but the reflective students clarify meaning in detail, while the impulsive students not in detail; (2) the reflecticve students analyze well by examining ideas and identifying arguments as well as reasons, while the impulsive ones do not analyse well that is caused by inability to find unstated information; (3) both students do inferences by querying evidence, forming hypothesis, and trying to prove the hypothesis and to draw a conclusion, but in querying evidence, the reflective students mention the relevant-irrelevant information confidently and use all relevant information to solve problem, while the impulsive student got confused in distinguishing between them; (4) both students carry out evaluation by assessing credibility of claims and quality of arguments before jumping to the next steps, yet the impulsive ones do not take any further actions; (5) the reflective students do explanation by stating results, justifying procedures, and presenting arguments clearly, while the impulsive students not clear (6) the reflcetive students always perform self-regulation by doing monitoring and correcting what they have done, while the impulsive ones barely perform self-regulation.

Keywords: critical thinking process, contextual problem, direct and inverse proportions, reflective-impulsive style.