DIFFICULTIES IN TRIGONOMETRIC LEARNING: reflections of basic education in higher education

Abstract

This text aims to identify whether the difficulties presented by students, from courses in the Exact and Earth Sciences area of a university, in relation to the teaching of trigonometry contents, is a problem that comes from Basic Education and reflects on Higher Education. In order to meet the objective, a field research was carried out with 28 students enrolled in a discipline whose contents involved calculations belonging to one of the four courses in the aforementioned area. The main theoretical support used was the Ausubelian Theory. This research has a qualitative nature in which the instrument for data collection was a questionnaire with questions about the difficulty in relation to the topic, and for data analysis, content analysis was applied. The data show that the lack of use of different teaching resources in classes, in Basic Education, can be considered a factor that limits the learning of trigonometric approaches. The trigonometric contents that are seen during the learning phase do not interact with the subjects’ prior knowledge. Furthermore, they show that the trigonometric topics taught during Basic Education did not stimulate students’ curiosity, a fact that is also reflected in Higher Education.