Análise ontológica do processo de concessão de auxílio socioeconômico, evasão e desempenho acadêmico no ensino superior do IFMG

Abstract

The analysis of Brazilian higher education reflects a panorama that has changed several times over time, especially since the year 2000, when the increase in the supply and expansion of access to different courses provided the population with opportunities for qualification that were previously restricted to individuals with the financial capacity to afford this investment. Among the challenges that have arisen in this new context, the complexity of maintaining institutional ties with students stands out, reflected in school dropout statistics. Considering that the provision of socioeconomic aid was one of the government strategies to support student retention, this thesis investigated, based on conceptual and practical resources from several areas of knowledge, such as Information Science, the relationship between the provision of such benefits and school dropout and academic performance in undergraduate courses offered by a Federal Higher Education Institution (IFES). This study is classified as applied, exploratory and explanatory research, with a qualitative and quantitative approach, using ExPost Facto research, experimental research and case study as procedures. Regarding the philosophical conception, the research is categorized as post-positivist and pragmatic. The methodological procedures were divided into three stages, given the scope of the activities carried out. The development of the first stage generated as main results a broad bibliographic survey on the themes pertinent to the thesis, a study characterizing the profile of candidates for socioeconomic aid in the institution studied and another study that constructed the informational behavior profile of the employees who work in the selection processes for granting the benefits. In the second stage, a technological structure, based on ontology, was developed to integrate the data from the three constructs analyzed in the thesis. The structure created allowed, in the third stage, analyses to be prepared on the relationships between the granting of socioeconomic aid, school dropout and academic performance from different perspectives and with the application of complementary techniques. The main results include: I) the identification of a positive and significant relationship between the constructs, indicating that, in the institution studied, the granting of aid contributes to the reduction of dropout rates and to the increase in the academic performance of students; II) the development and validation of an ontology for this domain, which can be reused in similar contexts by other educational institutions; III) a data-based analysis of the impact of the National Student Assistance Program (PNAES) on the institution under study. Finally, the thesis reinforces the transdisciplinary nature of Information Science by promoting diverse interactions with other areas of knowledge to generate informational products that, in turn, enable individuals to construct new knowledge based on real data and not only on subjective assumptions.