The context of students following the introduction probability theory course in the reflective pedagogy perspective

Abstract

the introduction of the probability theory course aimed to equip the mathematics education students about the probability theory basic knowledge. This subject was important, as it contained a pre requisite knowledge for the elementary statistics course, the statistical methods course, and the practicum of statistical methods course, and a provision for students in mathematics education department to teach the probability theory in high school and / or vocational school. The nature of this course was mandatory to pass, meaning that if a student wants to graduate from this course, then he or she should get the value of C for this course. From the experience of previous years, there were still many students who had difficulty to understand the material from this course. From the experience of previous years, the difficulty experienced by students was to translate the problems into mathematical symbols corresponding existing in the probability theory. In general, if a student had been able to translate problems into mathematical symbols, then the student would be able to resolve the problem. In the implementation of teaching learning process by using pedagogy reflective, there were five steps that need to be implemented, that were to know the context of the learner, provide experience to students, ask students to reflect, ask students to do actions, and evaluate of the learner achievements. In this paper, the author would only present about how the researcher could recognize the context of students who followed the introduction probability theory and what were the students’ context profiles. The results obtained by the researcher in this study were as follows: (1) the results of the reseacher tracking through academic information system (SIA) about the context of the area of origin of students that obtained by the reseacher were as follows: (a) there were five students from Sumatra, (b) 18 students from Java, (c) five students from East Nusa Tenggara,  (d) four students from Kalimantan, (5) one student from Sulawesi, and (e) four students from Papua, (2) the results of the researcher tracking through SIA about the students’ GPA were (a) two students had GPA between 3.50 to 4.00, (b) 11 students had GPA between 3.00 to 3.49, (c) seven students had GPA between 2.50 to 2.99, (d) 13 students had GPA between 2.00  to 2.49, and (e)  four students had GPA below 2.00. In addition to the data from the SIA, the researcher also conducted a test to determine the pre-ability of the students on the multiplication principle, permutations, and combinations. Results obtained were as follows: (1) 14 students could use the multiplication principle to solve a problem; (2) no student could use the multiplication principle and permutations to solve a problem; (3) five students could use cyclical permutations to solve a problem; (4) six students could use permutations if contains the same elements to solve the problem; and (5) no student could use the multiplication principle and combinations to solve a problem.