Pedagogical intervention tending at developing variational thinking in students of basic primary education Intervención pedagógica tendiente a desarrollar el pensamiento variacional en estudiantes de educación básica primaria

Abstract

This article highlights the importance of the development of variational thinking from elementary school, for which the research is oriented to identify problems for its teaching that allow establishing a didactic and novel strategy that attends to the context and does not compartmentalize mathematical thoughts. The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of some pedagogical interventions aimed at developing such thinking in fifth grade students, whose approach is quantitative with a descriptive level. For this purpose, an analysis of the teacher's praxis was made, a test was applied whose results allowed the preparation of a series of pedagogical interventions together with the development of a transversal project, and then the test was applied again to determine the impact of the pedagogical interventions. The results showed that some children were able to reach the abstraction and algebraic modeling of problems, to provide solutions through the formulation and subsequent resolution of equations and also to rely on the use of tables and graphs for the understanding of such problems, allowing to prove that variational thinking can be developed from the early school years; thus concluding that relating their environment and including the use of concrete material in the teaching-learning process allows them to easily understand the applicability of the acquired knowledge.