Introdução a álgebra no ensino fundamental: o “X” da questão

• Main Author: Silva, Cristiane Barcella [UNESP]
• Publication Date: 2016
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: por
• Source: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/134265
• topic: Math; Activities; Patterns; Algebra teaching; Algebraic thinking; Matemática; Atividades; Padrões; Ensino; Pensamento algébrico

Despite occupying a considerable part of the Brazilian Elementary and High School Curriculum, Algebra has been the great villain in Mathematics teaching. The results of the National System of Basic Education Evaluation (SAEB) show that rarely items related to Algebra reach a success rate of 40 percent in many Brazilian regions.The students complaints often involve exercises containing variables and unknown constants, always questioning why to mix “numbers” with “letters”. The aim of this work is to collaborate with Mathematics teachers, mainly of primary education who teach at seventh year, when traditionally the Algebra is introduced in Brazil. Our first step was prepair a survey of theoretical references that allowed us to understand the difficulties associated with Algebra teaching. After we developed a study of the different conceptions of Algebra, according Usiskin (1995) and National Curriculum Parameters (PCN 1998), seeking a better understanding of the several uses for the “letters” in this study area. This scenario allowed us to identify one of the main problems in Algebra teaching that is to become significant for the studentes the algebraic language, leading us to explore the possibilities and benefits of introducing the Algebra through the exploration of patterns and regularities. Such exploration aims to promote the development of algebraic thinking, the ability to generalize and the understanding of algebraic language. As a final result we suggested a didatic sequence composed by activities developed from some regularities patterns that can help the teacher in the algebra introduction and assist students at the development of algebraic thinking and language.