Ensino de imunologia por investigação: estudo do caso de uma sequência didática aplicada em três versões para turmas dos cursos de biomédicas em uma universidade

Abstract

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.