O papel das atividades experimentais na educação em ciências: Análise da ontogênese dos dados empíricos nas práticas discursivas no laboratório didático de física do ensino superior

Abstract

In this research, we analyze the discursive interactions established in a didactic laboratory for the teaching of General Physics in a discipline offered in the first year of a graduation course. The analysis takes the socio!cultural perspective and incorporates the discussions concerning the roles of language, the traditional didactic laboratories and the discursive dynamics in appropriation of academic scientific knowledge. The research corpus is constituted of 24 hours of video register and of 16 hours of audio register of students in pairs during the discipline Introduction to Experimental Physics ministered during the second semester of 2004. It is also part of the analysis material the field notebook, which accompanied the observation, an interview with the person responsible for the discipline and some written material from students such as class reports and accomplished tests. The analytical structure of the discursive dynamics in dialogue interactions (Villani, 2002) has been improved and applied in 10 classes of the course allowing the identification of a central discursive element in experimental science practices: the empirical data. In this case, the study of these discursive dynamics has favored the understanding of the dialogical process of gathering physical knowledge by students from the moment they face a prescript procedure in the activity guide!book, to the establishment of a final conclusion for the accomplished task. Our study allows us to suggest the possibility of investigating an ontogenesis of the understanding ways of the meanings associated with the empirical data. In this sense we emphasize the ways of understanding attributed to the empirical data as a crucial element for the establishment of a more relevant role for the traditional workbench didactic laboratory in the education of science. We consider this role to favor situations in which there is the confrontation of the accomplished experiment, from the establishment of a judgment about the gaining of this element, without which the registered measures by students are mere 8 results without any contextual meanings. This research results have, therefore, implications for the education of Physics teachers and for the organization of structured guides for the didactic traditional laboratory.