O aluno do ensino médio e a criação de uma fórmula para o termo geral da progressão aritmética

Abstract

This work presents a qualitative research which is guided by the objective of investigating whether if it s possible to create conditions so that High School students generalise terms of arithmetic progressions and, if so, whether this generalization allows students to build a formula of general term of this type of sequence. The relevance of this research is justified by the importance of the work with observation and generalization of patterns, identified by researchers like Mason (1996), Lee (1996) and Vale and Pimentel (2005) as a resource to students express algebraic thinking and create algebraic expressions, giving sense to the use of symbols. For methodological procedures, there were used stages of Didactic Engineering, described by Artigue (1996), to develop, implement and analyze a didactic sequence for the students of the Grade 10. The analysis about the present resolutions in the protocols and the recordings that were made during some sessions indicated that many of the students succeeded in generalizing terms, but that didn t allow some of them to use formal algebraic notation to represent the generality