The Experimentation by the undergraduates in Chemistry: relations with the formative context

Abstract

This paper presents a study with undergraduates of two chemistry courses, the Chemistry course A, and the Chemistry undergraduate course B. The study aims to investigate the Social Representations (SR) of these two groups about "experimentation" and to establish relations between these representations and the formative context of these students. It was used the structural approach of SR Theory. A questionnaire with 12 questions was employed to collect information, of which 4 questions make specific reference to the free-word association task related to the inducing term "experimentation", while the others refer to the characterization of the social group. The prototypical analysis and similitude analysis was used to treated the information, and determinate the SR of these groups. The results show different SR for the two groups, while the CC terms of the SR about "experimentation" for chemistry undergraduates of Chemistry course A are: laboratory, research, and test, for Chemistry graduates of Chemistry course B are laboratory, research, and knowledge. It was identified that both groups understand "experimentation" as an inherent aspect of chemistry as an empirical science. However, in addition, undergraduates of Chemistry course B conceive about experimentation as a process of Teaching Chemistry. Two factors can be indicated as contributing to explain this difference: i) the curricular structure of the courses; and ii) participation in projects for initiation to teaching.

Keywords

• formação de professores
• atividade experimental
• representação social
• abordagem estrutural