Elaboração de previsões e hipóteses no ensino remoto: como vídeos educativos japoneses auxiliam os estudantes do 8º ano a compreenderem a ciência?

Abstract

During the process of teaching and learning science, the student's involvement with epistemic practices of science can enable the comprehension about the process and characteristics of scientific activities. Over the years, researches were made to investigate student's conception about scientific activities, indicating that there are stereotyped and distorted visions about this activity. More recent studies demonstrate that through small changes, some aspects of that imaginary are getting away from the stereotypes described by the literature. In this work, the objective is to appraise the student’s involvement with activities based on epistemic practices, especially hypothesis and prediction elaboration, and how these practices contribute to the comprehension of science’s aspects. With that in mind, a teaching sequence that took as reference educational videos and demonstrative experiments were developed. Those educational videos belong to a japanese television program and a scientific communication contest (What is a flame? video, from The Flame Challenge contest). The television program’s name is 考えるカラス～科学の考え方 (Think like a crow – The scientific method), which the selected videos where 仮説大好き－デデニオン (Dedenion, those who likes hypothesis, own translation) and some experiments. The data production happened during the context of Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) – strategy adopted during the coronavirus pandemic – on an 8th year class of an elementary school, localized inside a federal university of Minas Gerais, during a month, with tree synchronous and six asynchronous classes, throughout the second semester of 2020. In this work, data analysis was performed in a qualitative way, utilizing pre-established categories and some other ones that emerged from the data. As an overall result, was noticed a positive engagement from the participants with the proposed activities. Initially the students had a good comprehension of some important aspects of science, that kept them away from some of the stereotypes or distorted visions. The proposed activities, anchored in the elaboration of hypothesis and predictions, promoted an expansion of the understanding towards the scientific enterprise, mostly regarding the knowledge’s temporariness and science’s own limitations. The involvement in epistemic practices also provided the conceptual construction about the flame, there were observed some quality improvements in the hypothesis elaborated by the students over the activities. Considering the context of the implementation – ERT – it was discussed that the research contributed to the expansion of knowledge about hypothesis and predictions as epistemic practices of science. It also was considered that the utilized videos were promising resources to the Education in Science.