Data handling in Provinha Brasil: early primary school childrens’ performance

Abstract

Data handling is a block provided for in Brazilian curriculum to encompass contents relating to Statistics. The Provinha Brasil de Matemática (Brazil Mathematics Test) is an instrument of external assessment used in the 2nd year of schooling that seeks to promote ways of evaluating and understanding learning in Mathematics. In this study, we aimed to investigate the creation of the items pertaining to Data Handling of the Provinha Brasil de Matemática and ways children understand the test questions. We chose a descriptive approach in which we performed the analysis of the questions and applied each item to a group of 40 children aged around 8 years and attending the 3rd year of Primary School, in order to investigate their performance. The results indicate that the form of presentation, the numerical values and the contexts have direct impact on the success of the participants. Usual assumptions, such as a greater ease with the use of images or that the use of said familiar contexts will facilitate reasoning were not confirmed in this study. We believe that the impact of this research indicates that evaluation of graphs and tables can be augmented with the use of varied situations and not so usual ones, which can produce greater focus on data and problem formulations, contributing to the growth of related skills.