TEACHING MATHEMATICS IN TECHNICAL VOCATIONAL EDUCATION (TVET)
Abstract
Mathematics plays an important role to improve students" skills in Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET). However, most of students at PTKI Medan have perceived the difficulties in accepting mathematics knowledge. All of the topics included were difficult to implement in their working lives. It means that in the process of learning mathematics, lecturers were less related the content to real life vocational education itself. So that, this paper aims to find out: 1). Does teaching mathematics contextually could positively impact for TVET students?, and 2). How significant the contextual method, based on the students" achievement, have a positive impact in the process of learning Mathematics in TVET? The data that used in this study were primary data that obtained from the students" final score, after all of the process of learning finished. The number of samples was 50 students that divided into two groups, including group experiment and class control. The analysis method used was descriptive statistics and independent samples t-test analysis by SPSS program. The result showed that the data distribution of experimental class more homogeny than control class. It means that, mean value of the experimental class will be more representative than the other class. This was as a positive impact for students. The knowledge was transferred evenly to all students. By looking at the significant value of Levene"s Test (0.878 > 0.05), it found that the groups of data have the equality of variance. The final analysis result showed t-count value > t table value (5.755 > 2.01), by the significance value < 0.05. It means that there was a significant difference in the mean values between experiment and control classes.
Keywords
TVET, PTKI Medan, Contextual Mathematics