Avaliação da distorção idade-série: uma aplicação em uma escola municipal de Ceará-Mirim/RN

Abstract

Education is something essential in everyone's life, because it is through education that everyone can learn about their rights and duties, – pillars of actions that build the path to access to citizenship. This work, developed in the scenario of basic education, had as its object of study the phenomenon of age-grade distortion of students enrolled in the final years of Elementary School, that is, from the 6th to the 9th grades. The surveyed population consisted of students who, given these specificities, were enrolled at Escola Municipal Dr. Júlio Gomes de Senna, located in the municipality of Ceará-Mirim/RN, from 2017 to 2022. The methodology used was based on the use of an indicator, built exactly with the purpose of better describing the object of study. In addition, a very appropriate statistical graph was used for the nature of the data in this research: the age pyramid, which is a histogram that displays the distribution of a population, highlighting the differences between age groups by sex. Another important tool used was the Lexis diagram; through it, a study was carried out of the school trajectory of the population formed by students enrolled in the 6th year, in 2017 and in the year 2019. During the monitoring of this trajectory, it was found that only 30.7% and 34.5% of the initial population in 2017 and 2019, respectively, managed to reach the ultimate goal. As for the age-grade distortion, the results showed the occurrence of cases in all analyzed grades, being predominant when it comes to male students. In cases of school dropout, from 2019 to 2020, considering all students regardless of gender, there was a reduction in cases. However, it was noticed that, when comparing these results according to the student's gender, the male group showed an increase over the period from 2017 to 2019, while the female group had a reduction in cases. However, in 2021 the percentage of abandonment increased, quite significantly for both sexes. The results obtained in this work show the importance of statistical methods as a possibility to better understand problems in education, so that, from this understanding, there is greater clarity for the construction of public policies.