As frações no livro didático do 6º ano: contextos, problemas, habilidades e significados

Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyze the problems in the 6th year textbook for teaching the operations of addition, subtraction and multiplication of fractions in the 6th year of Elementary School. The research is called qualitative, exploratory and bibliographic. The study was structured in four stages: Stage 1- choose a 6th grade textbook; Step 2- analyze the contexts of the problems that address the operations of addition, subtraction and multiplication of fractions from the chosen book; Step 3- identify the meanings of the fractions present in the contexts of the problems and Step 4- associate the problems with the skills from the National Common Curricular Base - BNCC specific to this year and object. The book adopted was "Essential Mathematics" by the authors Patrícia Rosana Moreno Pataro and Rodrigo Dias Balestri from the year 2018. In the book proposal on teaching fractions in relation to the operations of addition, subtraction and multiplication, eighteen questions were found, eight of which are problems contextualized and ten are exercises. During the analysis, it was found that the eight problems only presented everyday contexts/social practices or sociocultural contextualization. Moving on to the meanings, the meanings of part-whole, number, measure and multiplicative operator were identified in the eight problems. The book adopted in the research could involve other mathematical fields or internal contextualization of the mathematics discipline, historical contexts of mathematics or historical contextualization and contexts of other areas of school/scientific knowledge. Of the five BNCC skills, three were not included in these problems. In the problems analyzed, the meanings of quotient and measure for fractions were not observed. This research reinforces the importance of teachers developing a critical perspective based on research in Mathematics Education to better use Mathematics textbooks.