Reações de estudantes frente a dados inesperados.

Abstract

This work aims at investigating how secondary students react to unexpected situations when doing practical activities in the context of basic electricity. A second aim is to study what are the procedures students choose to adopt from the moment they observe oneunexpected outcome until they express, either explicitly or implicitly, their reaction to that anomalous data or observation. The analysis is based on the taxonomy of reactions to anomalous data proposed by Chinn and Brewer (1993; 1998), which was reformulated by Lin (2007) in his study of students reactions to anomalies and reaction procedures used.In this study a sample of Middle School students from a state public school were interviewed while they performed a set of simple practical tasks about simple DC circuits. Before the tasks, there were asked to advance predictions of what they expected to observe. None of the students have studied electricity as it is approached in secondary physics classes. Ten interviews were conducted and audio and video-recorded. In contrast to previous works on students reaction to anomalous data, the present work adopts a qualitative approach. Two case studies concerning the reactions of two pairs of female students arepresented and discussed. The subject matter and the population of the study were chosen so that the interviewees had to rely on their intuitive conceptions to carry out the tasks, to make predictions and to formulate explanations for the events they expected to observe and for thebehavior of the electrical circuits they set up. The underlying idea was that due to students limited conceptual knowledge relative to how electrical circuits work would make more likely the occurrence of episodes containing unexpected outcomes and observations. Among the nine possible reactions of students to anomalous outcome alreadyidentified in existing literature ignore the data, reject it, exclude it, hold it into abeyance, uncertainty about the validity of data, uncertainty about their own interpretation, reinterpretation the data, make some peripheral change in theory and change the theory , only the exclusion of anomalous data was not observed. Reaction procedures identified were the anomaly-reaction and anomaly-mediatorreaction. As mediators, which are the activities used by students during the reaction procedure, we find students-researcher and between peers discussions, experimental tests, and intermediate reactions. The students conducted experimental tests to verify the reproducibility of results and to test new hypotheses. In some instances, these intermediate reactions are shortcycles formed from new anomalies and corresponding reactions. These short cycles appear when students are conducting new experimental tests and are again surprised in their expectations. These events give rise to the short cycle of anomaly-reaction or anomalymediator-reaction.