Construção do conhecimento em hidrostática a partir de atividade experimental: articulando teoria e prática no ensino de física

Abstract

The present project addresses a research that was carried out in a public school of regular education in the municipality of Dom Pedrito, Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil. It has as its theme the experimental activity in Teaching Physics that aims to articulate theory and practice with the content of hydrostatics. The objective was to investigate the improvement of learning by proposing that students create hypotheses in an attempt to explain the physical phenomena involved during the experimental activities. From the hypotheses, they constructed, together with the researcher, the concepts of hydrostatics. It is a student-oriented teaching where the student becomes able to perceive the physical phenomena in order to elaborate his own ideas, constructing the knowledge. The research is characterized methodologically as to nature as qualitative, as to the approach as explanatory and as to the procedures as experimental research. As a research instrument, questionnaires (pre-test and post-test) were utilized to verify the students' prior knowledge and knowledge acquired after the activities were developed. As a result, the qualitative analysis and the applied methodology (Content Analysis) concluded that the experimental activities contributed to the construction of scientific knowledge, since the experimental activities provided the interconnection between concepts and practice, thus making the Teaching, of a discipline (Physics) considered difficult to understand, more pleasant and attractive besides adding context to this process.