Abstract:

Mathematics syllabus in the vocational education (level IV, ages 16 until 18) in Portugal (ME, 2004) is the equivalent to the secondary cycle education (10th to 12th graduates, ages 16 until 18) in Portugal.

The theme of this research is central tendencies measures in statistics included in a doctoral research where we intend to investigate what are the difficulties of the vocational students in the central tendency measures study, where and in what form they arise. We also want to know if different tasks and a project work will help to overcome those difficulties. That is, in a broader way, we want to investigate whether the tasks and the project work will contribute to facilitate and to promote students’ performance in the context of learning Mathematics vocational education (level IV) classes.

The theoretical framework adopted, in line with the research of the Research Group on Education Statistics at the University of Granada, is the Onto-semiotic Approach (Portuguese and Spanish acronym EOS). The reason that led us to adopt it in the investigation is that it is used in several studies in the teaching of mathematics and statistics with students of different levels of education in Spain and in Portugal. Also the semiotic conflict definition in order to identify difficulties and errors in the students learning is a powerful tool in this work along with didactical suitability of the classes planning and implementation.

In the first stage of this research, we built a questionnaire and have detected the students’ difficulties in central tendency measures in this vocational education (level IV) as already presented in Bogas, Nascimento, Morais & Raposo (2018). The didactical intervention – in Mathematics, in the statistical classes’ module – used tasks that allowed students to study and practice the central tendency measures theme and, in parallel, a project work was developed in order to collect and analyze data to characterize them. Using this intervention, students learned by themselves, supported by the teacher during the classes, and were able to do their own (small) statistical investigation.

In this paper, we present the structure and scheme of this didactical intervention giving emphasis to the semiotic conflicts that should be solved in this theme and present a summary of the teachers notes collected during the classes. We have adopted a descriptive framework, since the main results are not yet analyzed. Nevertheless, the teacher/researcher did enjoy students’ reply to this didactical intervention because she saw students’ progress along all the intervention.

Keywords:

Semiotic conflicts, Didactical intervention, Central tendencies measures, Statistics.