Modelos mentais de reações de oxirredução: um estudo exploratório de egressos do curso de Química Licenciatura

Abstract

People live in a world that revolves around knowledge. However, what is knowledge? What is learning? Learning is directly related to learning, a gradual and personal process that modifies behavior. Thus, learning to reflect, to reason, to use problem-solving strategies that make the process more meaningful, is a necessity, and Johnson-Laird's Theory of Mental Models makes this possible. In the educational realm, these models help individuals internally represent conceptual models, such as, for example, chemical oxireduction reactions. Thus, this research is divided into two stages: bibliographic research and interviews. Therefore, although there is a considerable number of articles in the main journals of Science and Chemistry Teaching, there are few that contribute to this research, verifying a lack of Brazilian articles that emphasize the relationship of mental models with oxireduction reactions, thus justifying its importance for the Teaching of Chemistry. As for the second stage, i.e., the interviews, whose objective is based on the investigation of the mental models of graduates of the Undergraduate Chemistry Course at the Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, about the chemical reactions of oxireduction, three mental models were obtained: incomplete, partial and complete mental models, which expose a gradual relationship between the mental models of the subjects and the conceptual model of oxireduction, i.e., the former is very distant from the conceptual model, while the latter is very close, with evidence of significant learning.