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| Author(s): |
Anielli Fabíula Gavioli Lemes
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Física (IF/SBI) |
| Defense date: | 2016-08-24 |
| Examining board members: |
Paulo Alves Porto;
Paulo de Avila Júnior;
Osvaldo Frota Pessoa Junior;
Ana Maria Pires;
Karina Aparecida de Freitas Dias de Souza
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| Advisor: | Paulo Alves Porto |
| Abstract | |
This thesis takes the philosophy of chemistry as a guide to investigate the process of teaching and learning in two general chemistry disciplines in a training course for chemists. In order to enable triangulation of results, the study relied on several sources: students\' responses to questionnaires, recording of classes, classroom students\' activities, expected responses by the lecturer for activities, and interviews with the lecturers. The investigation sought to characterize the preferences of students and lecturers about the kinds of theories and evidences used in their explanations. Lecturers preferred hypothetical theories and experimental evidences mediated by analytical instruments such as the spectrophotometer. However, students showed difficulties in dealing with such theories and mediated evidences in this initial stage of their education. A subjacent tension between the chemistry of molecules and the chemistry of substances, whose relation is internalized by the lecturers but not by the students, was also reflected in their choices for the types of explanations. Such tension can be understood considering the relationship between making chemistry (which is strongly based on instruments for separation and characterization of compounds, and on theories which describe the behavior of molecules) and teaching chemistry on an introductory course (which requires the choosing of contents and approaches to describe the relationship between the macroscopic phenomenological level and the submicroscopic explanatory models). For a chemistry undergraduate, observing an experimental evidence and relating it to a theory which involves submicroscopic entities to form an explanation is a very complex process. This process becomes even more complex when the evidence to be used is mediated by instruments. Thus, the results obtained and presented in this thesis point to the issue that the difference between the types of experimental evidences (direct or mediated) cannot be treated as a tacit knowledge in a General Chemistry university course. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 13/11498-0 - Peculiar ways of thinking, doing and understanding chemistry: in search of indicators around science experimentation |
| Grantee: | Anielli Fabiula Gavioli Lemes |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |