A resolução de problemas conceituais em física: uma análise a partir da Teoria da Atividade

Abstract

This work aims to understand how group activity of solving physics conceptual problems develop itself and is structured in the context of a Conceptual Physics undergraduate class, part of a Physics Teachers course at a Federal Institution of Higher Education in Brazil. In such class, focus of this research, teacher aims to review and deepen the main basic concepts of Physics, and their application in contexts. The methodology adopted by the teacher in his classes involves the distribution of conceptual problems that must be solved by the students, working in groups. Student responses should be agreed in the group and written at an appropriate level to be used in high school. The data used in this work were collected through audio and video recording from one of the groups. The analysis of the empirical material is based on the theoretical and methodological contributions derived from the principles of the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). This framework enables the understanding of the activity and it is performed by a set of events that extrapolate the analysis of the individual, including new elements that relate the subject of the activity to the community. In addition, CHAT as proposed by Engeström and his research group present innovative theoretical and methodological contributions to analyze the phenomenon of learning. The discussions presented in this thesis aim to answer the following research questions: 1) How do students deal with the different tensions that emerge during the activity? 2) What elements of the teaching methodology adopted in Conceptual Physics class favor the emergence of mini-cycles of potentially expansive learning? 3) What are the perspectives of learning in physics that emerge from problem solving activities in the context of the accompanying discipline? Among our results we highlight several points in the methodology adopted in the discipline - challenging questions, group work, teacher interventions, mediational means, among others - which in our view allowed for the emergence of potentially expansive mini-cycles of learning. We identify a contradiction between the approach used in this class with the one in which physics is taught in the investigated institution and the need to learn physics beyond the solution of classic problems as traditionally presented, whose excessive mathematical formalism turns out to be inoperative and meaningless to students. The study has implications for the training of physics teachers and also for the construction of learning environments in physics at other levels of education.