Analysis of Failure in Subjects Related to Chemistry and the Creation of a Leveling Discipline

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the low performance in General Chemistry I and Environmental Chemistry disciplines between the years 2012-2 to 2016-2 in the Superior Course of Environmental Management at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ) of Campus Maracanã; to report the creation of a leveling discipline called "Fundamentals of Chemistry" which was intended to alleviate the low performance in disciplines related to Chemistry due to high retention and consequently the dropout of students; also to investigate student performance after the introduction of this discipline in the course between the years 2017-1 and 2018-2. The methodology used was the creation of graphs that could show the percentage of students failing in these two disciplines over the years, before the creation of the leveling discipline and after. The results were very worrying, the subject of Environmental Chemistry had rates above 60% of failures, only in the year 2016-1 was 13%, in the subject of General Chemistry I the situation was much worse, with the lowest rate in 2014 -1 and 2015-1 equal to 59%. After the creation of the leveling discipline, the results improved significantly for the Environmental Chemistry discipline, but not for the General Chemistry I discipline, which still showed high failure rates. It is concluded that it is still necessary to investigate more about this situation of disapproval, retention and that it probably leads to evasion.