Abstract:

Problem solving based learning seeks to promote students' critical thinking and essential skills for acquiring new, fundamental and indispensable knowledge to overcome obstacles that will arise in the life course of every citizen. The use of different strategies, such as questioning, with the purpose of valuing and evaluating the reading of problem statements, as well as their interpretation, aims to achieve broad answers, in which students expose their opinions, points of view and arguments. that support them.

Given that critical thinking is a common thread of cognitive skills, along with decision making and problem solving, it was sought during Supervised Teaching Practice (STP) in primary school, to enhance these skills, combining the practical knowledge with the previously mentioned theoretical ones. In this sense, an attempt was made to create an enabling environment for mathematical learning to be an exciting challenge for students, developing their thinking, communication and problem solving skills, ensuring the articulation between content areas.

In this context, we present a study carried out in a 3rd grade class of primary school, where was implemented three problems in STP environment. Thus, it was intended to answer the following research questions: What strategies do 3rd grade students use in problem solving? What are students' main difficulties when they solve problems? In which, the methodology used was qualitative and interpretative in nature.

In the analysis of the answers to the problems, we tried to understand the resolution processes, formulating a posteriori analysis category and presenting illustrative examples of each of the defined categories. It was concluded that these students used diversified strategies such as scheme resolution, calculus resolution and direct response. Each student tried to reach the result by the method he thought was the most appropriate and with which he felt most comfortable. Their main difficulties were some misconceptions, miscalculations, misinterpretation and lack of knowledge of the contents.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, mathematics, problem solving, strategies, Supervised Teaching Practice.