A influência da língua materna na matemática: uma análise dos resultados das avaliações dos alunos do 3° ano do ensino fundamental do estado do Ceará

Abstract

Educational assessment has become notorious in Brazilian context because of, among other aspects, the strengthening of the practices and proposals of educational management, which have been fostered by the educational impact triggered by the results of students’ evaluations. In Ceará, there is the advance of discussions in the field assessment concurrently with the national scene. In 2007, the Literacy in Right Age Program was created, and it has a pioneering spirit, because it conducts the external and census evaluations of students in early grades of elementary school. Nowadays, the Program evaluates the students of the 184 cities of Ceará in Portuguese and Mathematics. This study investigated how the language can influence the performance of students in math test. The main hypothesis of the study focused on the fact that students with consolidated reading process would have better performance on the math test. The study was based on researches related to the discussion of Mathematics and Mother Language of authors such as Machado (2011), Granell (2008), Smole & Diniz (2001) and in scientific articles of authors such as Lorensatti (2009) e Ribeiro (2007). The study has a descriptive nature and according to the sources of research, it is a bibliographical and documental type. In obtaining the data required for analysis, the technique of principal components and other statistical procedures were used. In the analytical treatment of data, the method of analysis of the content was used. The research results confirmed the hypothesis. However, throughout the analyzes there were several other factors that helped to further explanation of the proposed hypothesis. Among the main results, it is emphasized that there is great correlation between student performance on the Portuguese and mathematics tests. In the four results categories, two had common characteristics represented by the influence of language and more difficult content of mathematics and the other two of them showed a lower influence of language related to the easy and moderate contents of mathematics. Subcategories were defined based on these findings related to the difficulties faced by students in answering the mathematics items. These are gaps on the linguistic knowledge, encyclopedic knowledge and textual interaction abilities. These aspects lead to the need for discussions in order to plan the pedagogical practices of Portuguese and Mathematics teachers and the developers of mathematics items for large-scale assessments. The research showed that the results of external evaluations promoted by PAIC can reveal many questions remain unexplored in education and that may be useful to encourage the debate on the diagnostic evaluation at the level of literacy.