Symmetry in portuguese fishing communities: students critical sense while solving symmetry tasks

• Autor(a) principal: Sousa, João Filipe Pereira
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Palhares, Pedro, Oliveras, Maria Luísa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/51237
• topic: Simetrias; Contextos culturais; Etnomatemática; Ciências Sociais::Ciências da Educação

This article analyzes the knowledge and the critical thinking level of students from two schools of different cultural contexts, regarding the mathematical topic of symmetries. The primary goal is to find and compare the critical thinking of students from a fishing community with students of a school of an urban type, when faced with tasks on symmetries involving artefacts / geometric motifs related to fishing activity. With a theoretical foundation based on Ethnomathematics, it gives prominence to the cultural and professional context students are from, so tasks were built taking into account the fishing context. Students revealed difficulties in symmetries identification and particularly in the representation of figures with symmetry. It also found that in tasks completion, students of the fishing context school proved to have a more accurate critical sense than students from the urban type school.