Construção de uma ferramenta para identificar visões compartilhadas acerca da natureza da ciência

Abstract

A quality scientific education is extremely important for the advancement of society. Educated citizens with good notions about scientific ideas and how science works are better able to make informed decisions about different societal problems that are intrinsically linked to science and its role in society. The pedagogical construct Nature of Science (NOS) has been developed, initially in the 1980s and 1990s, with the goal of improving people’s understanding of how science works by introducing contents of History, Philosophy and Sociology of science in science teaching. Several issues have been discussed about the teaching of this construct, such as those about how to approach it in science education. The perspective that was called “general postulates”, initially proposed by Lederman and his collaborators, has been the most commonly used. However, this approach has been heavily criticized in recent years for neglecting different aspects of science and scientific work, such as the plurality of scientific communities and their practices. Recently, several alternatives to this dominant perspective have been proposed, such as the Whole Science Approach, advanced by Douglas Allchin, or the Family Resemblance Approach, initially introduced by Guröl Irzik and Robert Nola and later reconceptualized by Sibel Erduran and Zoubeida Dagher. In the face of this controversy over the approach to NOS in science education, a developmental perspective has been also proposed, in which one would start from the treatment of “general postulates” about NOS – as put forward by Lederman and colleagues – and proceed, in a learning progression along science education, towards more complex and plural understandings, as defended by their critics. In this context, the Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to the Nature of Science (FRN), proposed by Erduran and Dagher, recently has become a widely used alternative in research on NOS teaching, as an option for a more plural and contextualized approach to its various aspects in science teaching and learning. The objective of this work is to build a tool to identify shared views about aspects of NOS considered in the FRN, using Q Methodology as a methodology framework. Q Methodology is an exploratory and mixed (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) tool that provides a clear and structured way of eliciting and understanding the opinions of a diversity of people on a specific controversial topic, making it possible to categorize individual standpoints into shared views. The application of the Q Methodology includes five steps: Research design, Data collection, Analysis, Results, and Interpretation of results. In this dissertation, we report results from the research design stage, presenting the construction of the “Concourse” – the representation of the total spectrum of shared views on a given subject - and the “Q-set” – the sample of items that will be used in the application to identify possible shared views –. The “Concourse” and “Q-set” were produced based on the FRN for the characterization of different views on a series of aspects addressed in this NOS approach.