Iniciação à ciência: uma análise de atividades investigativas com crianças

Abstract

The initiation to Science for children should provide attitudes that promote the construction of school scientific knowledge, in view of the exploration of the physical and chemical world. In view of this, we seek to develop this performance, supporting our research in investigative activities, because one of the possibilities of doing Science, at school, is through - Experimentation. The subjects are students from eight to nine years old, belonging to a multi-grade class of 3rd and 4th year of a public rural school located in the interior of the city of Toledo / PR. Through an adaptation of science activities at progressive levels of investigation, authored by Banchi and Bell (2008), children had the opportunity to participate in a sequence of experimental activities at four levels of investigation. At Level 1, children receive a question, procedure and solution, so they are guided in a closed script. The proposal is to confirm which methods conserve food. In the Level 2 activity, children receive only one question and procedure, the purpose of which was to find out which components are present in the milk. At Level 3, children receive only one question, so the proposal is more open, to prepare a cake recipe and prepare it. At Level 4 of investigation, children receive only one research topic, so they must develop a project (with a question, procedure and solution) addressing the subject “reuse and / or recycling of food scraps” and present at a Food Fair. Sciences. For each activity, we propose teaching situations - Question, Procedure, Solution and Observation, which determines how much information the teacher provides to the student. This effort aimed to investigate the contributions of these activities to school scientific initiation, from the perspective of a “grid of indicators” by Astolfi et al. (1998). We made a digital photo camera available for the children to make records. For the construction of data, we used a video camera, transcriptions of the children's speeches and photographic records produced by them. From these elements, we build narratives for analysis. As a result, it was possible to identify the ability that children demonstrated to work in research activities at level 1, 2 and 3. At level 4, some of them had difficulties to develop an open investigation on their own. We chose this type of approach because we believe that children feel confident within this process and at the same time develop the capacity for initiative, questioning and creation that lead to school science initiation.