Ligações químicas: investigação da construção do conhecimento no ensino médio

Abstract

Chemical bonds form the basis for understanding the formation and behavior of the substances in everyday life. The investigation focus of this survey was the teaching and learning of chemical bonds in high school, and the main objectives were to make a diagnosis of how the content is being developed at this level, as well as to investigate the process of knowledge construction by the students of the 1st year of high school, through a Teaching-Learning Sequence (TLS) and traditional teaching. In order to achieve such objectives this survey was conducted in two parts. In the first part there were three investigations which provided evidence of the importance given to chemical bonds in high school. Following the principles of qualitative survey the data were collected using instruments made from guidelines described in the literature or for the specific purposes of each investigation. In this part of the study we investigated: - the concepts of chemical bonds of 124 students of the 1st year of high school from two public schools and a private school in the region of Santa Maria, RS, who had already studied the topic formally in class; - The approach of the chemical bonds in textbooks (PNLD 2015-2017), through the analysis of chapters related to the topic of each title - The perception of four high school teachers and two professors about the chemical bonds education. The results provided the following picture: the topics chemical stability and nature of the interaction between atoms and ions are being developed inappropriately, by using models that cause conceptual distortions. Moreover, the traditional method prevails in class and teaching is focused on the transmission of content with the help of the textbook. Based on this, interventions were planned and developed focusing on the study of the chemical stability based on energy aspects and the electrostatic model for each type of interatomic bond. In the second part of the survey, the investigation of knowledge construction in chemical bonds occurred by monitoring four classes of the 1st year of high school, in a total of 50 subjects. The content was developed by school teachers in two classes through the TLS and the other two by the traditional method. For data analysis, it was considered Bachelard theory and four dimensions, which are: chemical stability, ionic bond, covalent bond, metallic bond. Initially, the conceptions of the students in each dimension were evaluated in philosophical areas and later in hierarchical levels. At the end of the survey, it was drawn an epistemological profile for each student from the assessment of the considered dimensions. Monitoring the ideas of the students, from the two contexts, throughout the study of chemical bonds revealed that the construction of knowledge happened by overcoming epistemological obstacles linked to realistic and empiricist philosophical areas. It was observed that most of the students from the TLS context (55,2%) and traditional (66,6%) had primarily a rational profile at the end of the survey. The results suggest that there is a relationship between the area of epistemological profile and the capacity of transition between the levels of representation of matter, as the explanations related simultaneously the macroscopic, submicroscopic and symbolic levels were given by the students who had rationalists profiles. In addition, there was an advantage of TLS in relation to the traditional context, related to the aptitude of the students to employ the three levels of representation at the same time. Finally, this study showed that it is important to have theoretical explicitness regarding the curriculum models and educational planning in order to obtain satisfactory results in the chemical bonds education.