Compreendendo visões de estudantes sobre ciências e suas relações com o ensino fundamentado em modelagem em contextos cotidiano, científico e sociocientífico

Abstract

In the last two decades, some studies in the Science Education area have been emphasising the importance of making scientific education more authentic, aiming at promoting a broader scientific literacy and, consequently, contributing to the education of critical-reflective citizens. In addition, such studies have highlighted the importance that teaching may contribute to the development of a comprehensive view about science. In such a context, a Modelling-based Teaching has been viewed as a promising teaching approach. This is because such an approach encompasses several other scientific practices and therefore may favour the development of students less naive views about science. However, to date, the literature of the area points out that there are still no empirical studies that have tried to investigate the relations between Nature of Science and Modelling-based Teaching in Science Education. From this gap, this study, based on Gilbert and Justi (2016) and Justi and Erduran (2015) theoretical ideas, investigated: (i) Which aspects of Nature of Science do High School students show when participating in modelling activities in everyday, scientific and socio-scientific contexts? (ii) How does the participation in modelling activities in the contexts investigated contribute to such students manifestation of a comprehensive view about science? To what extent does this occur? and (iii) How can the Model of Science for Science Education v.2 support the analysis of data collected in regular teaching contexts? Three modelling-based didactic units, based on the same topic, previously produced by our Research Group, were applied into two regular Chemistry classes. Data collection involved audio and video recording of all classes, the researchers participant observation, field notes, artefact collection, and simple interviews with the students in some classes. After the selection of a group of students and intense interaction with the data related to this group gathered from multiple sources, a case study was drawn up for this group. For data analysis, the Model of Science for Science Education v.2 was used as an analytical tool. We also used the NVivo software to optimise the data analysis process. The conduction of this study contributed not only to filling the gap found in the literature of the area, related to the absence of empirical studies that try to investigate the relations between teaching and learning about science from the Modelling-based Teaching perspective, but also to the production of a tool to analyse data gathered in regular teaching contexts. We also point out the importance of such a tool being used both in the generation and conduction of further teaching activities and in future analyses that may foster discussions about the great challenge of promoting science education aiming at providing conditions for the development of students comprehensive views about science.