PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The need to make connections in doing problem-solving has been the focus of many researchers. The purpose of this study was to describe the formation of productive connective thinking schemes when students do complete the phases of mathematical problem-solving. Schemes are formed through the phases of cognition, inference, formulation, and reconstruction. This qualitative study adopted several modes of data collection to triangulate data to ensure the validity of the findings. Twenty four research participants were selected among high performing Grade 12 students of three Indonesian Secondary Schools using the purposive sampling method. Productive thinking schemes were identified based on the analysis of the participants’ written assignment, think-aloud recordings and interview transcriptions. Description of the schemes was concluded from the understanding of the causes of the problems and the way the participants make associations between ideas. Students’ thinking structure is aligned with the structure of the given problem. In solving the problem, participants formed constructive thinking schemes which were generalization schemes that require high spatial and abstraction abilities. This allows reconstruction of the connective thinking network scheme that forms a new connective scheme that can be used for more complex problem-solving.