Ensino por investigação científica no ensino médio: a qualidade da água

Abstract

This document was built to meet the continuing needs in education, methodologies that improve the process of teaching and learning through greater involvement of students. Thus, a Sequence of Investigative Teaching (SIT) was conducted in a room of the First Grade, in the city of Baixo Guandu, Espírito Santo. In this context, water quality was problematized and debated in nine stages of investigative teaching, from the perspective of Science, Technology, Society and Environment. Based on teaching by investigation, students were led to act as scientists, making observations, problematizing, raising scientific questions and hypotheses, besides organizing their own experiments and conducting their tests. In this proposal, the teacher acted as a mediator of knowledge and the student was the protagonist of his own learning. In carrying out their own experiments, the students went out to the field, collected samples from a spring and the rivers that flow through their city, the Rio Doce and the Rio Guandu, and also collected water treated by the municipal water supply company. They performed the analysis of the samples, also testing the Multiple Tube technique for total and thermotolerant coliforms. Finally, the students disseminated their experience to the school community and evaluated the methodology, pointing out positive and negative points and making suggestions to improve the methodology. As a result, evidence of Scientific Literacy (SL) was found among students who after SIT demonstrated understanding of typical science terms and techniques as well as a good understanding of doing science, its processes, methods, equipment, and its social, cultural and environmental implications.