Análise dos processos de raciocínio matemático mobilizados por alunos de 1º ano na realização de tarefas exploratórias de adição

Abstract

This qualitative and interpretive study aimed to analyze the mathematical reasoning processes mobilized by 1st-grade students during the resolution of exploratory tasks. Mathematical reasoning, understood as a process of communication and inference that allows the construction of new mathematical statements based on previously known ones, is considered essential for meaningful mathematics learning from the early years of schooling. Official documents, such as the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC)(Brasil, 2018) and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)(2020), emphasize the importance of developing students’ abilities to reason, represent, communicate, and argue mathematically. In this context, exploratory tasks stand out as valuable pedagogical tools, encouraging students to discover new relationships, develop creativity, and gain intellectual autonomy. The research was conducted in a 1st-grade classroom at a municipal school in Apucarana, Paraná, Brazil, involving 24 students organized in pairs. The tasks were focused on addition. Data collection involved classroom observations, written records, audio and video recordings, and photographs. The analysis drew on the mathematical reasoning processes proposed by Jeannotte and Kieran (2017), encompassing the search for similarities and differences, validation, and exemplification. The results showed that students actively mobilized different mathematical reasoning processes, such as conjecturing, justifying, comparing, generalizing, and validating. Students formulated hypotheses, provided mathematical justifications, compared strategies, identified regularities, and generalized properties to other cases. It was concluded that the use of exploratory tasks, integrated with an exploratory teaching approach, significantly contributed to the development of students’ mathematical reasoning, fostering the construction of new knowledge from prior concepts and strengthening mathematical learning in the early years of schooling.