Perspectives for science education: what experts say in science education

Abstract

The critical scientific education, used in the present work, is guided by a science teaching more reflective and contextualized. This approach gathers together the main impacts of science as well as the resolution of socio-environmental problems and conscious decision-making. In this way, the scientific education focused on the citizen education contributes so that each one acts in a significant way inside and outside the school spaces. In this sense, we analyzed in this article the conception of scientific education of a group of specialists, who work with the theme studied in this work. The panel of selected experts participated in the Delphi study. The Delphi method, used as a methodological resource, consisted of sequences of questionnaires sent by e-mail to all participants. For each turn of the questionnaire, the specialists’ answers were systematized and analyzed. Subsequently, these answers were reformulated and sent back again to the participants, seeking to find consensual elements among them. From the content analysis, three categories of critical and scientific education were identified. They are: I) function of critical scientific education; II) nature of science and III) methodological aspects. The most recurrent category was the function of critical scientific education. Thus, the elements identified by the specialists develop transformative actions in the school to integrate the natural sciences with social sciences and recognize the influence of the sociological and philosophical aspects in the understanding of the nature of science.