Raciocínio proporcional e resolução de problemas em contextos piscatórios portugueses

• Main Authors: Filipe Sousa, Pedro Palhares, María Luisa Oliveras
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad de Nariño 2015-01-01
• Series: Revista Latinoamericana de Etnomatemática
• Online Access: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=274041586005

Since ancient times human beings, particularly the merchants, used mathematical knowledge enabling them to solve problems related to trade, which the least skilled in the business or the mathematics context, thought to have no solution or to be too difficult to solve.Problems involving proportional reasoning were considered of medium to high complexity. However, the merchants, many centuries ago, without formal schooling, ingeniously solved some problems of relative complexity.Even today, some professions, despite their low levels of education, have a very close relationship with problems involving proportional reasoning. Such is the case of fishing communities that use informal mathematical knowledge in their daily lives, although sometimes this becomes difficult to translate into the classroom language and vice versa. This study, of a qualitative nature with Ethnomathematics as a reference, was developed in two fishing communities (Câmara de Lobos - Madeira and Caxinas) by collecting information on mathematical elements used in everyday life (boat building). At a later stage, tasks in the context of proportional reasoning were applied with students (of 10-12 years) of two schools of different contexts: with the fishing community of Caxinas and with the more urban context of Vila Nova de Famalicão. Data will be presented in a descriptive and interpretative form, including both students' strategies and difficulties. Also we will present a brief analysis on the possible influence or interference of school mathematics on the performance of students in these two very different social contexts while faced with the same mathematical tasks.