MATHEMATICS AND MUSIC IN THE CLASSROOM

This study reports the analysis of a teaching practice in the classroom. The main goal of this study was investigate if the music incorporated in a mathematical task promotes the student motivation to learn mathematics. For that, it was created an interdisciplinary task with basic concepts of music and statistics. The artefact with interdisciplinary task was developed by a teacher of mathematics with some knowledge in music. The interdisciplinary task articulates mathematics and music, and is a tool creates to review basic concepts of statistics. The task was applied to students of 9th and 11th grades of the Portuguese education system. The research is focused on looking for indicators that allow us to infer about the interest and motivation of the students to solve the requested task.
In a first phase the artefact was applied in three classes: two in 9th grade and one in 11th grade - mathematics applied to the social sciences. Data gathering was done through audio recordings, photographic records of class moments, recordings on the board and answer sheets given by the students. It was followed by the elaboration of the multimodal narrative (NM) of the class, made by the teacher. The multimodal narratives constitute a document in which chronologically are narrate various aspects of what was observed in the classroom while the students performing the task.
Data were also collected through interviews applied to a sample of students from the three classes. The task was applied in each class, with two fifty-minute lessons in different days. From a class of 9th grade, three critical episodes were analysed through the NM: task presentation by the teacher; listening to musical compositions create by the student and from the answer to the question “what is the frequency of a sound?”
From the analysis of the content of the NM and the interviews were searched evidence that allows us to understand if the students have engaging in the resolution of tasks. From the study emerge indicators that allow to infer that the application of the task led to the motivational increase of the students. The learning context provided by the nature of the task led to a true involvement of the students characterized by a little anxiety throughout the task, even when the mathematical concepts were being well worked.