Metodologias ativas no ensino de bioquímica: possibilidades e contribuições

Abstract

Biochemistry is an interdisciplinary science, present in the curriculum of several higher education courses. Due to the complexity and abstraction of its concepts, many students perceive it as a challenging discipline, especially those belonging to the first semester of undergraduate courses. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, teaching biochemistry began to take place online, bringing new challenges to students and teachers. This fact brought the need to investigate new methods capable of improving the remote teaching of biochemistry. Active methodologies are student-centered approaches, which awaken students' autonomy, motivation and provide meaningful learning. In this way, they are presented as an important tool to assist in the remote teaching of biochemistry. The objective of this study was to evaluate the contributions of different active learning strategies in the biochemistry teachinglearning process of undergraduate students between the period before and after the Covid-19 pandemic. To this end, questionnaires were used to investigate the perception of first-semester students in a remote biochemistry course in relation to different learning strategies using active methodologies: games, Peer instruction and interactive whiteboard. This work also presents experience reports of graduate students from the graduate program in Biological Sciences: Toxicological Biochemistry (PPGBTox) at the Federal University of Santa Maria, who used active methodologies as a didactic tool in oriented teaching internships. The use of active learning strategies in the teaching of biochemistry brought satisfactory results in relation to motivation, participation during classes and engagement with the contents, in faceto-face and remote classes, both for students and professors. In general, active methodologies contributed to a better acceptance of biochemistry content, facilitating the teaching-learning process.