Uso de um inventário conceitual de meiose para analisar dificuldades persistentes na compreensão de conceitos entre calouros e futuros professores de Biologia

Abstract

Meiosis is a persistently difficult topic for students at different levels of education. The objective of this work is, through the use of an inventory of concepts and interviews, to quantify and compare the performance of tested freshmen and veterans on the following genetic concepts associated with meiosis: ploidy; relationship between amount of DNA, number of chromosomes and ploidy; chronology of the main events of meiosis; and pictorial representation of chromosomes; as well as understanding the nature of the difficulties encountered in understanding concepts. This study was conducted with two groups of students from the Biological Sciences course at UFMG: 25 freshmen and 45 veterans (prospective teachers). The research started with the application of a Meiosis Concept Inventory (MCI), whose items addressed problematic concepts of meiosis already documented in the literature. In the qualitative stage, cognitive interviews were conducted with volunteer students (n=12) about selected MCI items. Data collection was performed remotely. The results from the MCI application were categorized to identify non-problematic concepts and common misconceptions. Interestingly, the overall performance between the freshmen and veterans was insignificant. For almost all evaluated concepts, student responses to items had a wide distribution of assigned distractors or students showed preference for specific distractors. Only two items had a high proportion of correct answers (≅70%). The most difficult concept of understanding identified in both groups was ploidy, in addition to other conceptual difficulties, such as the difference between chromosomes and chromatids, products of mitosis and meiosis, and the poor articulation between DNA replication and meiosis. In the interview stage, misconceptions identified in the quantitative stage were confirmed and new misunderstandings were identified, such as regarding the arrangement of gene alleles on chromosomes, the interference of DNA replication on the number of chromosomes and cell ploidy, the representation of gametes and the structure of chromosomes. It is concluded that freshmen and veterans hold misconceptions about elementary concepts related to meiosis. Such conceptions tend to be resistant to teaching and constitute an obstacle to a meaningful understanding of meiosis.