Representações sociais de alunos e professores do ensino médio sobre a matemática

Abstract

This work analyzes High School students' and teachers social representations on Mathematics. It also investigates, on the side of the teachers, some representations on subjects relative to the school environment. Among them the curriculum reorganization of the High School Teaching announced by the Curricula Parameters National, starting from LDB. We took for base the theory of the Social Representations (Moscovici) and we looked for in a historical panorama of the teaching of the Mathematics in the world and in Brazil the origins of some of the representations concerning that discipline. We verified that the representations on the values attributed to the Mathematics as well as the ways of conceptualize it, vary in agreement with the political and cultural of each time. The subjects were 207 students of the High School Teaching (CEFAM, Common, and Technical) and 82 teachers (being seventeen of Mathematics) that answered to a questionnaire and the answers were analyzed in a quantitative and qualitative way. The answers of the subjects indicate that the valuing of Mathematics happens in three spheres: one relative to its utilization in the life (be it daily or professional), another to the individual school performance (where the success and the failure of the student influence in the liking for Mathematics and in the positive and negative marks left by it) and other to the development of the logical reasoning (where we noticed representations anchored by the common sense). In relation to the items related to the contextualization, prevented by the PCNs, we verified the representations of Mathematics as disciplines contextualized socially and culturally, indicating the passage of Mathematics from science of reality to science in reality. Concluding, we verified that the causes of the negative representations of Mathematics are possibly related to the teaching of this discipline. The teacher's methodology seems to be capable of creating and of modifying representations, and of transforming them into positive representations, if he develops new competences.