Análise de crenças e atitudes de estudantes do curso de Licenciatura em Química sobre temas ciência-tecnologia-sociedade como indicadores da compreensão da natureza da ciência e da tecnologia

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the beliefs and attitudes of students in the Chemistry Degree course on science-technology-society (CTS) as indicators of understanding the Nature of Science and Technology (NdCeT) from the perspective of Scientific and Technological Literacy (ACT). To this end, some questions were applied in the Brazilian version of the Cuestionario de Opiniones on Science, Technology and Society (COCTS) with students of the Chemistry Degree course of a Brazilian federal public university. This study involves a quantitative and qualitative approach, following the ethical aspects that the information obtained in this research is confidential, with no identification of the participants. The methodological procedures adopted were: 1) Selection of COCTS questions; 2) Application of COCTS to students in the Chemistry degree course; 3) Data analysis. For the data analysis, we calculated the Attitudinal Indexes (AI) of the students participating in the research for each of the COCTS questions, considering the categories: adequate, plausible and naive, and the score given by the licensee of the questions by the degree of agreement that varies within scale from 1 to 9 points. In general, students in the Chemistry degree course have plausible, naive and adequate beliefs and attitudes about different CTS themes, the results show that the majority of students who participated in this research have naive beliefs and attitudes about the Epistemology of Science. Considering that NdCeT is one of the essential components for ACT (BENNÁSSAR, et al., 2010) and that NdCeT focuses on the epistemology of science and technology (ALONSO, 2010), students point out weaknesses on CTS themes. These weaknesses reflect the students' understanding of the NdCeT, compromising the ACT of the undergraduate students.