Dificuldades na aprendizagem dos números racionais

Abstract

The goal of this research is about investigate the difficulties shown by students in two levels of education, comprehension of irrational numbers, and their different representations. In order to get knowledge about those difficulties, it was elaborated a theoretical foundation based mainly on PCN and authors that discuss about the subject, as Valera (2003), Santos (2011), and others. Therefore, the difficulties shown in the theoretical framework were synthesized in order to analyze data from a sequence of activities. The sequence was drawn up with activities that seek to use different representations of a set of irrational numbers and it was used to observe the difficulties encountered by students. After, this sequence of activities was tested in 72 students of the 9th grade of elementary school and 62 students of the 3rd year of high school in three public schools of the city Cornélio Procópio. The collected data were analyzed according to Bardin’s content analysis (2004). Through analysis, it can be verified that the students have many difficulties, which persist over the years. Even though, the rational numbers being arranged in the official document, which is applied to teach students in the 7th grade, the difficulties have been found in the 3rd year of high school students.