Investigando a concepção de frações de alunos nas séries finais do ensino fundamental e do ensino médio.

Abstract

The study of fractions has becoming theme of discussions by many of mathematics´ educators. Results from the Educational Assessment System of Pernambuco (SAEPE) show bad scenarios in this mathematics topic, regarding elementary and secondary schools levels. The study of fractions begins only at the third grade, despite some literatures defend that this practice should start be much earlier – from the first scholar year. Considering this situation, we may perceive the complexity that exists and the time student need to learn fraction. In order to identify the conception of fractions in students in the final grades of Elementary and Secondary Schools, 630 students from one public municipal school and one public state school have been diagnosed. The instrument comprised of 10 questions, specifically tabulated and graphically analyzed, involving fractions such as: part-whole, quotient and operator, the influence of pictures in the questions, continuous and discrete amounts and also the equivalence of the fractions. The results reveal that the best performance was obtained by students of the central grades (sixth and seventh grades of Elementary School) and from the students second year of the Secondary School up. Several conceptions were found, such as: between two fractions, the greater their corresponding terms, the greater will be the fraction; the greater the denominator, the smallest the fraction, regardless of circumstance; the equivalence of fractions is strictly associated to the equality of their corresponding terms; to determine the corresponding fraction in a picture of colored parts, it does not matter if the divided parts are alike; the conception of half in colored pictures is conditioned to the contiguity of these parts and not the import of the equity between colored parts and non-colored parts; and could express how much the influence of natural numbers create barriers in the learning of fractions; the good performance in the equivalence of fractions happens only from the seventh grade and increases with school years; the presence of pictures in the questions such as contiguous quantities had great advantages in their performance in most items of the instrument.