Instructional Guidance for Beginner Students in Problem Posing

This study aimed to conduct an instructional guidance for beginner students in problem posing. There were 26 students involved in this study in which divided in two groups using the rapid diagnostic test where seventeen are considered distinguished and nine beginner. During problem posing without guidance, 78 responses were generated coming from the respondents (distinguished and beginner) prior to instruction and 51 responses from the beginner students after the structured approached was introduced. All the posed problems were examined and analyzed for solvability, linguistic and mathematical complexity. It was found that the type of the problem student’s posed prior to instruction by beginners were more on non-math questions and most of the math questions were non-solvable. On the other hand, distinguished students generated more on conditional propositions and math questions that are solvable. Thus, distinguished students have good abilities in posing mathematical problems compare to beginner students. Moreover, when the structured approach was introduced the type of the problem posed by the beginner students were improved. With this, beginner students have the capacity to improve their abilities in posing mathematical problems and structured approach is effective in improving their abilities in posing mathematical problems. Thus, this suggests that the multi-step data coding scheme and structured approach in problem posing are useful to the teachers and researchers who are interested in evaluating the students’ posing of problem.