Tese
O papel de uma atividade de ensino por investigação de imunologia nas aulas de cursos das áreas de ciências biológicas e da saúde
Fecha
2019-02-27Autor
Paula Seixas Mello
Institución
Resumen
This work aligns with epistemological studies of science education, whose conception of
learning has shifted from learning as a product (conceptual understanding) to learning as
scientific processes and practices. Based on the educational goals for professional training in
Immunology within Biological Sciences and Health courses, we propose taking into account
elements of the epistemology of Immunology as teaching and learning tools. Thus, we devised
a didactic investigative sequence that provides experience for students in two of these aspects:
experimentation and abstraction. Our activity engaged students in the analysis of experimental
data obtained from a typical Immunology technique, "the complement fixation assay", as a
prerequisite for the inquiry-problem solving. Our aim was to determine which elements of the
scientific practice of Immunology are used by students during the activity. More specifically,
we wanted to understand how discourses are constructed epistemologically in the learning
environment, how much they resemble those desired by scientific culture and what we need to
access in order to improve the epistemic quality of these discourses. To that end, we analyzed
the epistemic practices used by students during the construction of written arguments in the
scientific reports produced during the investigation. Our tool for argument analysis was
developed from one described by Kelly and Takao (in Epistemic levels in argument: An
analysis of university oceanography students' use of evidence in writing, Science Education, 86
(3), 314-342), which allowed us to evaluate the epistemic status of students’ statements. As a
result, we observed that students adhered to the genre conventions of scientific writing when
constructing sentences that relate to particular experimental observations to more general
theoretical assertions. However, our analysis points to students' difficulties in using evidence
obtained from non-verbal inscriptions while producing the written text. This suggests a need
for a greater number of active-learning activities to provide instruction for how data are tied to
the text and about the relevance of the data to scientific rhetoric. In addition, we noted that in
some reports the conclusions do mention a response to the research problem, suggesting that
reconsidering the steps that make up the experiment is also a sophisticated epistemology that
should be encouraged in scientific writing training. Our findings reinforce the importance of
improving abstraction-skills within active-learning activities in Immunology science education.