Experimenting in sciences teaching: the viewpoint of students in a specialization course

Abstract

The objective of this study is to characterize the profile of students in a Sciences Teaching specialization course, check on how they were prepared to develop experimental practice lessons during their early training and identify their conceptions on the influence of experimenting in scientific concept comprehension. It is a descriptive, exploratory research that took place in July and August 2016 during classes of the Instrumentation in Chemistry Teaching discipline of the Lato Sensu Course in Sciences Teaching at the IFMT Confresa/MT Campus. A questionnaire with 9 questions was applied, some of which open and others closed in a Likert scale. The investigation involved 45 post-graduate students, most of which licentiates in Chemistry, Biology, Pedagogy, Mathematics and Physics. Many of them did not have enough practice lessons in their early training and do not feel prepared to carry out experiments. They all recognize how important experimenting is for scientific concept comprehension. There are 24 teachers who work in teaching, the majority of which state that they sporadically propose experimental practice in their classes. They further reveal that the schools do not offer an adequate structure, which reinforces the need to qualify teachers to utilize experiments as an ally in sciences teaching.