Crianças com dificuldades em resolução de problemas matemáticos : avaliação de um programa de intervenção
Abstract
The comprehension of written texts continues being one of the most difficult academic
practices for students of Basic Education. If comprehending a written material in linguistic
terms brings out difficulties for some students, a text written in mathematical language can be
even more difficult, because besides the mother language understanding, mathematical
concepts are also needed. A lot of research has been done to try to find better ways to help
children understand what was asked in mathematical problem-questions. However, there is a
lot to be done to understand the difficulties and processes of problem resolution and about
basic conceptual comprehension present in mathematical problems instructions. In this sense,
the purpose of the present study was to elaborate, apply and evaluate an intervention program
performed with children in the fourth year of Elementary School who showed difficulties
comprehending and solving mathematical problems, and maximize their cognitive capacity.
The methodology chosen was the experimental delineation of comparison between groups, an
experimental and a control group. The study consisted of a pretest, an intervention program, a
post-test and a delayed post-test. The pretest evaluated the children s performance in
resolving arithmetical problems. Next, the teaching program was used with students who
showed performance under 40% right in problems. This aimed to develop, in the students,
enough knowledge to increase their resolution capacity of mathematical problems. That
program sought to teach students to read mathematical problems instructions and find the
most appropriate mathematical representation to solve the question. For this, it was necessary
to teach the arithmetical operations concepts, since one of the children s difficulties was
connected with understanding the meaning of each operation (addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division) and its symbolic representation. The post-test and delayed posttest
results for the experimental group were superior to the pretest results for the experimental
and control groups, indicating an improvement in performance for the students who took part
in the program. Those data showed that the intervention utilized was efficient, increasing the
cognitive capacity necessary to the task of resolving arithmetical problems, which basically
consists of comprehending written instructions and representing them mathematically.