SOCIAL REPRESENTATION OF MATHEMATICS AND PROBLEM-SOLVING PERFORMANCE
Keywords:
Social representation, Problem solving, Transitive relations, Context variablesAbstract
In the present work, the authors intended do investigate to
what extent the social representation of Mathematics can influence
children's problem solving performance, through the manipulation of the
instruction given. 16 problems, using three-term transitive relations were
used. The premisses always contained the same relational term - both
were either affirmative or negative - and the question was always
affirmative. 56 subjects of both sexes, with the average age of 9 years
and 6 months old, took part in the study. The subjects were attending the
third year of a private Elementary School in Brasília, Brazil. They were divided into 2 groups. In the Control Group, the subjects were told to solve
"guessing games", while in the Experimental Group they were told to
solve "Mathematics problem". Both groups were allowed 40 minutes to
carry out the tasks. The results show that the social representation of an
object of knowledge influences task-solving. However, the representation
seems to interact with contingencial variables which may be linked to the
immediate interactive context, such as the experimenteis sex.
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