Survey of conceptions on STS relationship in chemistry teachers training: potentialities of a problematizing instrument

Abstract

The formation of critical citizens capable of making relevant decisions in society, relating to scientific and technological aspects is one of the objectives concerning a scientific education based on the Science, Technology and Society (STS) approach. In order for this approach to materialize as effective actions in the Basic Education classroom, it is necessary that such discussions enter the initial training of teachers. Therefore, this work aims to discuss the effectiveness of a problematizing proposal for surveying the conceptions of undergraduate Chemistry students on STS relations, in the context of the Supervised Internship curricular component, in order that these assist in structuring the teaching planning. For this, we used a video by the astrophysicist and scientific disseminator Neil deGrasse Tyson, entitled “Science in America”. Based on his speech, a questionnaire can be built with the purpose of evaluating the previous conceptions of those undergraduate students about the STS triad. The answers obtained through the elaborated questionnaire, as well as the audio recording of this phase, constituted the corpus of this research. The analyzes carried out show that these strategies were effective in identifying the previous conceptions of the undergraduate students, which made it possible to re-plan the conduct of the curricular component in which the research was carried out, in order to provide moments of greater discussion about this theoretical framework.