Study of the potential of problems to practice a research activity in mathematics at elementary school in French-speaking Switzerland

Abstract

Problem solving is one of the essential elements of the curriculum for students in French-speaking Switzerland. Currently, it is at the core of the priority objectives in mathematics teaching and a chapter "help for problem solving" is dedicated to it for each teaching cycle. The aim of this paper is to study the potential of problems to practice a research activity in mathematics for elementary students. After having defined from an epistemological point of view the notions of mathematical activity and problem, 13 mathematical statements proposed in this specific chapter for 10–11-year-old students were analyzed. The results show that these statements are not problems in the sense of the definition given in this paper and the mathematical activity potentially produced would however be limited from the point of view of the knowledge mobilized through the processes of experimentation, formulation, and validation.