A evolução do entendimento dos estudantes em eletricidade: um estudo longitudinal

Abstract

This study focuses on the learning of physics concepts by high school students. It aimed to a) verify if the students develop their understanding of electricity concepts throughout the taught unit, b) identify if the contextual factors such as gender, the class, the course, the social economic class and the level of students´ engagement contribute to explain their development in the concepts researched. In order to achieve the above objectives a longitudinal study with three waves of data collection was developed. For a better understanding, qualitative and quantitative tasks applied to the third year high school students throughout the teaching of the unity about electricity, were analyzed. A system for categorizing the data based on the hierarchical concept of electricity was created in order to better analyze the qualitative data. The Rasch model was used to analyze the dichotomous data for the elaboration of a ruler to measure students understanding based on their tasks´ answers. The results showed that the students developed their understanding about electricity. However, the students demonstrated different levels of development. The main factor found to explain students´ development differences was the level of students´ cognitive engagement in the classroom