Compreensão da situação-problema, do enunciado e das opções de resposta nas questões do ENEM

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to evaluate the comprehension of texts which contextualize questions on the ‘National High School Exam’ (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio – ENEM). The answers to the questions in this exam are, therefore, highly dependent on students’ reading skills. The study is theoretically grounded on the works of: de Alliende e Condemarin (2005), Brown (1980), Haberlandt (1988), Kintsch (1994), Van Dijk e Kintsch (1978), Rumelhart (1985), Silva (2005), Singer (1988), Smith (1989, 1999), Solé (1998), Spiro (1980), Van Dijk (1996), Kato (2004), Koch (2006a, 2006b) e Marcuschi (2008). The research was conducted in two parts: Practice Test and Open-Ended Questions. Ten multiplechoice questions from previous tests of the National Exam (from 1998 to 2005) were chosen for the Practice Test. The choice of the questions was based on two criteria: questions which dealt with Portuguese content and which used texts of different genres for contextualization. The goal of the Practice Test was to select questions of different difficulty levels to use for the Open-ended Questions. Based on the results of the Practice Test four questions were chosen for the Open-ended Questions: 01 (one) question with the highest scores in the Practice Test, 01 (one) question with the lowest scores, and 02 (two) questions with medium percentage of scores. The Open-ended questions were elaborated so as to allow for the identification of the correlation between the Reading comprehension; Inferences; Contextualized questions; National High School Exam (ENEM).based on the inferences made and on the identification of the purpose of the questions. The analysis of the results obtained for the Open-ended Questions demonstrated that the comprehension of the contextualizing texts is not always enough to guarantee the understanding of what is being asked in the question or the answering of the question, even when students make appropriate inferences and are able to establish logical relationships between the texts and the questions. Other factors such as the form and structure of questions and the degree of coherence among the text, the instructions to the question and the question itself also affect question responses.