Um estudo do desempenho de estudantes do ensino médio em questões contextualizadas envolvendo funções quadráticas

Abstract

This study aims to examine the difficulties found by high school students of a public school in João Pessoa-PB concerning contextualized mathematical questions on quadratic functions. This qualitative and exploratory research uses open questionnaire containing contextualized questions on second-degree function from previous editions of ENEM and other kind of Vestibular Exams as mechanisms of data collection and production. The questionnaires were applied to students from 1stand 3rdHigh School grades of a public school and used afterwards to make a comparative study with the recommendations of the National Common Curricular Base and Mathematics text books. The students responses were corrected and analyzed in order to understand the difficulties encountered by them. In most cases, student presented interpretation problems and several mistakes on the domain of basic operations involving whole numbers. Despite having studied the content before, students from the 1stgradehad insufficient performances. Students of the 3 rd grade were higher in quality, for some of them managed to use appropriate strategies to reach part of the solution, however the results showed that some of them were not able to find the correct answer for not having carefully observed what was being requested in the statement. The conclusion is that, in order to enhance the performance of students, it is necessary to focus on contextualized issues as to improve their skill on solving mathematical problems.