Increasing Junior High School Students' Mathematical Comprehension with Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) Approach

Abstract

Mathematical understanding is an important basis for thinking when solving mathematical problems. Mathematical understanding is also the basis of thinking in learning mathematics to find out the results of mastery learning. This can be seen in the results of the test scores of students with mathematical understanding abilities that are still below the level of mastery learning, therefore the importance of mathematical understanding abilities is increased by using the Realistic Mathematical Education (RME) learning approach. This study uses mixed methods where the research strategy combines qualitative and quantitative methods simultaneously. The results of the research conducted the average score was still low, namely 62.5% below the average and 37.5% above the average, but after applying the RME learning method, it showed that the average student score increased to 21.9 % below average and 78.1% above average. Based on the results before and after the test, students' mathematical understanding ability increased by 40.6% after applying the RME teaching method, thus proving that RME had a positive effect on increasing mathematical understanding.