Jurnal Peluang, Vol. VI, No. 2, Oktober 2018 ISSN : 2302 – 5158 15 Pembelajaran dengan Pendekatan Kontekstual untuk Meningkatkan Kemampuan Pemahaman Matematis Muhsin 1 Zulfa Razi 2 1,2 Pendidikan Matematika Universitas Jabal Ghafur, Sigli muhsinbrhm4@gmail.com Abstract Mathematical comprehension ability is a very important initial ability possessed by students in the learning process of mathematics, especially in understanding mathematics. One important goal in learning mathematics is that the material taught to students is not as memorization, but with understanding students can understand the concept of mathematical material. Mathematical understanding is one of the goals of every material delivered by the teacher, because the teacher is the student's guide to achieving the expected concept. Therefore, it is very important to develop and improve the ability of students' mathematical understanding in the process of learning mathematics. This study aims to examine the enhancement of the ability of mathematical understanding between students who obtain learning with a contextual approach and students who obtain conventional learning. This research is an experimental study using a pre-test post-test control group design. The population in this study were students of class VIII MTsN 4 Pidie, Aceh in the 2018/2019 school year. Through purposive sampling, two classes were chosen in parallel, namely class VIII 1 as the experimental class and VIII 2 as the control class. The instrument used to collect research data is a mathematical comprehension ability test. The statistical test used is the t-test to analyze the data for increasing the ability of mathematical understanding. The results of the study showed that the improvement of students' mathematical comprehension ability who obtained contextual approach learning was better than students who received conventional learning. Keywords: contextual approach, mathematical understanding ability Abstrak Kemampuan pemahaman matematis merupakan kemampuan awal yang sangat penting dimiliki oleh siswa dalam proses pembelajaran matematika khususnya dalam memahami matematika. Salah satu tujuan penting dalam pembelajaran matematika bahwa materi-materi yang diajarkan kepada siswa bukan sebagai hafalan, namun dengan pemahaman siswa dapat memahami konsep materi matematika. Pemahaman matematis merupakan salah satu tujuan dari setiap materi yang disampaikan oleh guru, sebab guru merupakan pembimbing siswa untuk mencapai konsep yang diharapkan. Oleh karena itu, sangat penting untuk mengembangkan dan meningkatkan kemampuan pemahaman matematis siswa dalam proses pembelajaran matematika. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengkaji peningkatkan kemampuan pemahaman matematis antara siswa yang