Resumen

Investigate the motives of students to participate in tasks proposed in mathematics classes can bring contributions to the understanding of what effectively leads them to get involved in classes and can also contribute to the area of Mathematics Education. The purpose of this article is to present a discussion about the motives of a group of four students from the ninth year of a public school in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, when involved in investigations in the mathematics classroom, using, for this, the lenses of Activity Theory. Data were collected through interviews. The qualitative analysis of the data showed that the reasons that lead them to participate in investigative tasks are related to these tasks, but not only. The social environment in which students are inserted may be as, or even more important for the emergence of motives.