Resumo

MAYEN, Silvia; BATANERO, Carmen  e  DIAZ, Carmen. Semiotic conflicts of mexican students for a problem of comparison of ordinal data. Relime [online]. 2009, vol.12, n.2, pp. 151-178. ISSN 1665-2436.

This study analyzes the responses of 643 Middle and High School students from Mexico to an open ended problem about the comparison of ordinal data. Following the onto-semiotic approach developed by Godino and colleagues, the responses were categorized by the choice of measure of central tendency and the observed semiotic conflicts. A Chi-square test was used to investigate the relationship between the type of response and the level of the students. We observed better results for the secondary students, the majority of whom used the median and the mode, although a greater percentage of them gave no response.

Palavras-chave : Understanding; semiotic conflict; comparison of distributions; ordinal data; mean; median.