Abstract:

Framework:
Being aware of the non-literacy and school dropout, failure rates in elementary education in Brazil have reached worrying indicators. Learning is a complex process. There are multiple factors that contribute both positively and negatively on student learning and their effects will reflect in the future of students. There are children with pathophysiological disorders that prejudice their learning. However, in other students, difficulties arise due to the influence of school/teachers and the relationship with their family.

Objectives:
Identifying the learning difficulties areas in the curricular components of Portuguese and Mathematics; identifying the difficulties in the fields of learning in each area and analyzing the relationship between the sociodemographic and scholastic variables and the learning difficulties.

Methods:
An exploratory and descriptive, quantitative and correlational study in a sample of 178 students of the third year, in a public school in Taquarana, Alagoas, Brazil. We use a questionnaire for the sociodemographic and scholastic characterization of the students and one scale is used in the school for the formal evaluation of the learning.

Results:
The majority of the participants are male (55.6%) with an average age of 8.53 years, divided into six classes (three in the morning and three in the afternoon). The smallest class has 25 students and the largest class has 35 students. They take an average of 20 min traveling to school. We verified that 34.3% of the students live with single, separated, divorced or widowed parents. 31.5% of the students report having a really bad or bad family environment and there are classes where it is more evident. In 37.1% of the cases the parents have no education and in 53.4% they do not help with the student’s homework or other studies. The amounts of students that have already failed are 26.4%, and among them, 36.2% have failed three or more times.
The learning difficulties in Portuguese and Mathematics are higher in the oldest students, male and those who have failed more than once.A bad/very bad family environment, the situation of the parents, the lack of education of the parents and the fact that they don ot help the children with their homework contribute to the difficulties.
In Portuguese, there is a greater difficulty in respecting the time for listening and speaking, reading and interpretation, production of texts and the use of the orthographic rules. In mathematics generally they have a greater difficulty. Highlighting the parameters of identification the basic maths operations in the situations-problems and the elaboration of tables and graphs.

Conclusion:
In our study, we found students who had large rate of failures and evident difficulties in both Portuguese and Mathematics. We found that many are the factors that contribute to the onset of the learning difficulties in some students, although, we cannot help but reflect on the influence of the family. Family disorders, bad family environment and the fact that the parents have no education and do not help the children in their studies proved to be influential in the failure of students.

Keywords:

Learning, learning difficulties, family, education.