Formulação e resolução de problemas: uma alternativa metodológica para o desenvolvimento do pensamento crítico

Abstract

This paper presents the trajectory and results of a bibliographic study whose objective was to identify and analyze academic productions in the context of Mathematics Education that address problem posing and problem solving, and their possible relationships with the development of students’ critical thinking. To this end, open-access institutional repositories were consulted, considering master’s theses published between 2020 and 2025. The study focused on the analysis of three works, selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria established to delimit the research corpus. Among the analyzed works were: a master’s thesis that investigated problem posing and problem solving related to conscious water consumption at school; another that analyzed the creation of mathematical problems from flyers and advertisements in the teaching of Financial Mathematics; and a third that discussed contextualization in the teaching of Mathematics in a rural school. As a result of the investigation and systematic analysis of these studies, it was possible to map the thematic scenarios that supported the productions, highlighting aspects that indicate certain convergences among the analyzed works, including the presence of elements such as contextualization, the development of problem situations, an emphasis on activities aligned with students’ everyday contexts, as well as the analysis of social practices related to the teaching of Mathematics. Based on the data obtained, both from the individual analysis of each study and from the comparative analysis among them, a systematic overview of characteristics that seem to structure and guide reflections and practices of problem posing and problem solving in the mathematics classroom is presented. Moreover, the results show that the act of posing and solving problems tends to foster meaningful student engagement and to bring the teaching of Mathematics closer to the social aspects of students’ lived experiences, which, consequently, may contribute to the development of their critical thinking when facing situations, both inside and outside school, whose understanding depends on mathematical knowledge.