Caracterización del error en la suma y resta de números racionales en estudiantes de grado sexto en una institución pública de Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

This research seeks to review the errors made in the operations of addition and subtraction of rational numbers in a group of 23 students of sixth grade at the IED Joaquín Castro Martínez, Bogotá, Colombia. The research contemplates four groups of errors: a) attention, b) ignorance of the problem, c) understanding of concepts and d) procedure. The results were analyzed using Bayesian’ statistics to understand how the probabilities of a mistake are related to demographic characteristics. The most representative error found was the ignorance of the answer, which is typical of the learning process, specifically: “not simplifying”, followed by “not applying the correct algorithm”, and procedure errors. Regarding to the Bayesian probabilistic analysis, strong differences between men and women for different types of error were found, as well as minimal differences between women due to ethnicity, but which are not considered significant due to the sample size, which indicates the beginning of an interesting field of study.