Students’ difficulties in learning mathematics
Primary basic education students of the medium, have ages between the age of six and elevenEasy to handle or, instead, visualize those who have been handled and who are imagined with little effort.
In the preschool stage, regularly, children’s thinking has special characteristics and a way of reasoning and interpreting what he observes and that does not correspond 8 to the reality known by adults. This is what has been called the child’s logic. Some characteristics of that thought are the irreversibility and inappropriate management of relationships between the parties and the whole. That logic, that knowledge that the child has built from the world, in his early years, needs to evolve in such a way that it allows him to understand others and act properly.
Mathematics, in primary education, can contribute to develop processes that exercise the child’s thinking and allow himperson. Mathematics begins with the action on things. Piaget points out that the manipulation of objects is necessary for intellectual development and that a child understands the world to the extent that it interacts with it, it transforms and coordinates physical action with mental.
It is common for a child to have ease, even dozens, memoristic, fail to have to choose a certain number of objects. This is because the concept of number has not yet acquired, based on the notion of conservation. There are children who have trouble understanding the meaning of numbering systems and more specifically.
With respect to the learning of arithmetic operations, especially the direct ones such as the sum and multiplication, it is observed that it does not keep a strict relationship with the mental level, since it becomes purely mechanical and memorial training;But this does not assume that they have a thought, operative, that is, the operations are carried out, but they do not understand their meaning.
However, although they get to mechanize them, they usually need more time than other children who use concrete support such as helping with their fingers, drawing stripes in a corner of the sheet. This is normal in the first states of learning, but once the domain of the operation is acquired.
All these difficulties are accentuated if they are inverse operations – subtraction and division. These require, in addition to the notion of conservation that of reversibility and have less automation possibilities. They cannot be learned, as they happen in the direct mechanical way, but always implies a logical process. There are children who are able to make simple multiplications, but they make mistakes on the subtraction. There are multiple cases of children from the last degrees of the primary basic that do not correctly perform the division because they have not come to understand it.
As is well known, the operative calculation is learning that they acquire without too many obstacles. To the performance of the operations themselves arrive with relative ease, but what, if it costs them, is their application to the resolution of the problem.
Difficulties in learning mathematics can begin from basic operations processes or geometric or representative figures, which make their compression difficult. Mathematics is logical thinking and it is necessary.
Today the area of mathematics and branches that accompany this are very difficult to understand or very complex for some, but what is this problem? According to Piaget (1989), ‘’ The first step to get the student to make significant learning is that the new learning content breaks the initial balance of their schemes ’’ ’. It can be said that what makes mathematics a problem is the way they are taught, since many students do not have an understanding of these despite the fact that it is not such difficult issues that are taught, but suchtime the language used by the teacher is not adequate to teach them, since the language I used this is of the utmost importance depending on the level at which the student is.
Also another problem that makes mathematics so difficult to understand is that examples of everyday life are not widely used. And it is that the everyday is very excluded from what happens in the classroom, and it is with these conditions that students should learn mathematics. To dimension the fact we will talk about a study that was done in Brazil Carraher, and Schliemann, (1991), the study of this problem shocked all of Latin America, in this case a sample of children from the street and another of children ofthe school. The former knew how to solve street mathematics and the latter knew how to solve school mathematics problems. The research consisted of exchanging the problems of the school to the street and the street to the vice versa school. The result was that the street child could not solve the street problems, but the school child can not solve the street problems either. The result in itself is a deep criticism of educational models. If we talk about mathematics, and for us to teach them, we are supposed to teach mathematics so that the child or young man improves his daily life, but what is taught in school does not respond to the daily situations, and even worse the knowledge of the everyday lifeIt does not look like the school. This problem is still presented today and there are many other factors that cause it.
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