Analysis of Verbal Interactions Between Brazilian Students in a Physics Investigative Activity Class With STS Approach: A Case Study

Abstract

This article presents results on the analysis of verbal interactions of students from a federal public high school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during an investigative activity class about the properties of magnets. This experimental assignment was part of a didactic sequence developed for the study of Electromagnetism, which was structured using a Science, Technology and Society (STS) approach combined with the investigative activities method, in which students divided into groups carried out a series of experimental essays on the contents that were presented to them. The objective was to determine if students were able and capable of structuring their own causal statements to a problem involving knowledge of Physics, when given the proper conditions to work with an experimental setup. Differently from the traditional transmission-reception didactic model, the STS didactic orientation seeks out to incorporate the scientific syllabus into the students' daily life relationships. A qualitative methodology was used from the transcriptions of video and digital audio recordings that were registered during classes, some scenes of an educational episode were selected and the verbal interactions of the students among themselves were analyzed, looking for some indicators that could identify whether scientific literacy was accomplished. Analysis showed evidence that students were able to construct meaning with their own words by reasoning about what was observed in the experiments performed.