A construção do pensamento teórico no ensino de estatística: uma perspectiva desenvolvimental

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the dialogue between the Theory of Developmental Teaching (or Developmental Education Theory) and the formation of theoretical thinking in the teaching of statistics to basic education students, taking as context a public school, a setting where the ethical-political commitment of the research to the integral formation of subjects from the working class is materialized.Grounded in the Cultural-Historical Theory and Dialectical Materialism, the investigation seeks to understand the pedagogical and human foundations that enable the overcoming of mechanical teaching and the establishment of critical learning. The theoretical framework, anchored in Vygotsky, Leontiev, Davydov, and Hedegaard, allows for the conception of teaching realized through the double movement of thought: from the empirical to the theoretical and the return to the concrete reconfigured by consciousness. This movement expresses the process of concept formation and the development of higher psychological functions. Thus, the teaching of statistics is understood not merely as the acquisition of content, but as oriented human activity that transforms both the object of knowledge and the subject who learns. Methodologically, the research articulates theoretical study and analysis of pedagogical practices conducted in a Davydovian Formative Didactic Experiment, structured to establish a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. This experiment made it possible to observe how students, when confronted with socially significant situations (such as the critical analysis of manipulated graphs, data, and information), challenged everyday knowledge with scientific knowledge, internalizing statistical concepts in a process of intellectual and ethical reconstruction. The results reveal expressive advances in the formation of theoretical thinking, demonstrating that when teacher mediation is guided by developmental principles, students begin to understand scientific knowledge as an instrument for reading and transforming reality. The study therefore reaffirms the role of study activity as the core of learning and demonstrates that mathematics, understood as a historical and socially situated human production, can become a means of humanization and the construction of critical consciousness. Keywords: Developmental Teaching; Cultural-Historical Theory; Theoretical Thinking; Statistics.