Recebido em 15/3/11; aceito em 2/5/11; publicado na web em 17/6/11 STUDENTS' ATTITUDES TOWARD CHEMISTRY IN DIFFERENT UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS IN COLOMBIA. This work reports a study on the attitudes of Colombian students towards Chemistry in different undergraduate programs. The research was performed on 769 students belonging to several Chemistry courses, by applying an adaptation of Salta and Tzougraki's test and using Likert's scale. The results revealed that Chemistry is being considered as difficult and little useful, but very interesting. Thus, the difficulty to learn Chemistry may be associated with its language and abstract conceptual nature. In addition, more attention should be given to the class contents and methodologies provided to the students, in order to engage them with those interest aspects and meaningful topics of each program.Keywords: attitudes toward chemistry; chemical education; science teaching. INTRODUCCIÓNLos problemas sobre el aprendizaje de las ciencias, en particular de la química, frecuentemente se ponen en evidencia al indagar a profesores encargados de impartir esta disciplina. Expresiones como "no quieren aprender", "nada les interesa", "no saben nada" o "sólo estudian para la prueba", hacen parte comúnmente de juicios valorativos generalizados emitidos desde algunos profesores hacia sus estudiantes. Las expresiones anteriores involucran de manera global las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia las ciencias, un objeto de investigación actual en el campo de la educación, las cuales se han estudiado más de forma general que hacia las disciplinas en particular. Las actitudes hacia las ciencias están estrechamente ligadas con los logros académicos, y el desarrollo de actitudes positivas en los estudiantes hacia las disciplinas científicas constituye una de las grandes responsabilidades de cada profesor de ciencias.1,2 Además, las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia la ciencia constituyen un factor importante que ejerce influencia sobre la motivación.3 Osborne caracteriza las actitudes hacia el aprendizaje de las ciencias como algo urgente de investigar debido a razones que tienen que ver con: 4 disminución de personas que quieren estudiar ciencias, disminución en el rendimiento escolar, la importancia del conocimiento científico para afrontar problemas sociales y la relación entre utilidad económica y conocimiento científico. De otro lado, la profesión docente impone como principal preocupación el aprendizaje (construcción de conceptos, actitudes y valores y la generación de competencias) valorado en forma global por los rendimientos y puesto en evidencia por los porcentajes de pérdida en los cursos. De esta forma, el presente trabajo parte de la inquietud de indagar más acerca de los factores involucrados en el bajo rendimiento académico y los elevados porcentajes de pérdida en los cursos de química general de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, los cuales pueden oscilar entre 10-60% (por profesor o curso), con una población de estudiantes heterogénea por estar compuesta por personas d...
It is presented some considerations related to the role of cinema to introduce and contextualize issues as the image of science and scientists and how science works. Cinema can be used as an important tool in science teacher training or education because it lets to establish connections between two relevant aspects in natural science classrooms: the emotional component that allows the audience to establish a relation with the characters of scientific stories (Arroio, 2010) and the historical-philosophical-sociological component which contributes to show a more real image of science in school. Cinema can help to show the presence of different influences in science as the importance of contexts, and to discuss about the presence of some stereotypes, and an idealized image of individual-male scientific work, a neutral science, the meaning of discovery among others. Some movies were analized to establish this possible contribution. In further, according to these results it is possible to compare some important elements of scientific discourse presented in cinema and this one in science school textbooks. Key words: cinema, natural science education, science and scientist image, scientific speech.
In this study it is presented several considerations concerning the elements that biographies could contribute to chemistry education. It is analyzed two particular cases: biographies from two high school chemistry textbooks and an audiovisual in the form of an animated fictional documentary about the life of Marie Curie. The analysis was carried out following a methodology designed to analyze textbooks in which we visualize science as a network where we identify elements that allow us to track how science circulates; we have used previously these elements in analyzing audiovisual materials for classroom (Arroio and Farías, 2011). These results show that despite the fact that biographies have elements which justify the criticism they have received within science education they can improve the contextualization and localization of scientific activity by making new connections between those actors that are not generally part of schools’ accounts of science: scientists, institutions, and places, amongst others. This fact was further substantiated after analyzing the documentary. It is proposed that the inclusion of biographies has a vast potential for conveying a more realistic image of scientific activity - but only if the biographies are specifically designed for teaching and are understood to be narrowly related to the popularization of science, science education, and the historiography of science. Moreover, biographies can lend more weight to the role of scientists as narrative axes, where then the school discourse can recover the person, that is, the scientist as a subject and individual. Within a setting where school science is primarily centered on concepts this process can strengthen the affective links between students and teachers. Key words: audiovisual, image of science, narratives, scientists, textbooks.
An application of systemic networks to understand students' conceptions: how big is an atom?Resumen: Este trabajo describe el empleo de las redes sistémicas para analizar las concepciones de un grupo de estudiantes de la carrera de biología acerca del tamaño del átomo. Las respuestas a la pregunta ¿qué tan grande es un átomo? se evaluaron antes y después del estudio de los temas de estequiometría y estructura atómica. El análisis de las redes permitió identificar que, después del estudio de los temas mencionados, la red se hace más compleja como evidencia de un cambio en las respuestas. No obstante, las categorías de la red antes y después de la intervención didáctica se mantienen. Al final del proceso, una gran parte de los estudiantes que no tenían respuesta a la pregunta propuesta inicialmente se posicionan y adoptan como solución la comparación con elementos que conocen, siempre relacionando algo "muy grande" con algo "muy pequeño". Abstract: This paper describes the use ofsystemic networks to analyze the conceptions of a group of students from a BA program in biology about the size of the atom. The answers to the question How big is an atom?, were evaluated before and after studying issues of stoichiometry and atomic structure. The network analysis identified that, after studying the above issues, the network becomes more complex as evidence of a change in the answers. However, the categories of the network before and after the educational intervention are maintained. At the end of the process, a large proportion of students who had no answer to the question posed initially positioned and adopted as a solution the comparison with items they know, they always relate something very large with something very small. Palabras clave:Redes sistémicas, niveles de representación en química, concepciones de los estudiantes.
The inclusion of historical content in science classes has been widely discussed even before science education emerged as a discipline. In this paper we aim to show that when science is understood as a complex network, network analysis can be used to identify and strengthen elements that make up its historical narrative. This narrative can then be introduced at school in order to communicate a more contextualized, human, and connected image of science more akin to scientists’ science. First, we show some applications of a methodology based on Bruno Latour’s model of science circulation in the analysis of various classroom materials: textbooks, documentaries, movies, and biographies. Then, based on the results of these applications we discuss the model’ sapplications we discuss the model’s we discuss the model’s vast potential for identifying various aspects that could be strengthened in the classroom, thus providing the possibility of writing a more “personalized” history of science, one more in tune with teachers’ and students’ varying interests and that more closely resembles what scientific activity actually means in the contemporary world.
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