Instrumental and Relational Understanding Analysis of 5th Grade Elementary School Students on Integers Addition

摘要

This research aims to analyze and describe students' instrumental and relational understanding of the addition of integers. The research employs qualitative research with a descriptive approach. The subjects in the research were three students of the 5th grade at SD Insan Amanah, Malang, Indonesia: one subject with high mathematical abilities, one subject with moderate ability, and one subject with low ability. The instrument employed in this research is a test to measure subject's instrumental and relational understanding and interview guidelines to support the test data. The collected data was analyzed by using interactive techniques, which included data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. The results showed that students with high mathematical abilities had a high relational understanding because the student met all indicators of relational understanding, while the students who got good relational understanding met most of the indicators of relational understanding while low-ability students only met half the indicators of relational understanding. Students with average understanding is considered to wrongly understanding the conceptions while low-ability students have misconceptions and procedural errors.