Análise das dissertações e teses dos PPGs da área do Ensino de Ciências e Matemática do RS - 2000 a 2011

Abstract

The Science Education (SE) area emerged in the 70's because of the demands of the Brazilian society of the time. Since then the SE has been growing and producing a dense publications. However, it perceives that there are few studies focused on the analysis of this documents, mainly from 2000. Given this context, this paper seeks to investigate the theses and dissertations (DTs) of the graduate programs from the area of Teaching of Science and Mathematics, registered in the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), belonging to RS from 2000 to 2011, in order to identify the contemporary trends this production and provide an overview of the works of RS. To develop this work was carried out a search of DTs in the period from 2000 to 2011, through the PPG websites and visits to the libraries of their institutions. Data were analyzed using an analytical matrix adapted Coutinho et al. (2012) with the following descriptors: researcher sex, titration, characteristics of work (qualitative or quantitative), area and sub-area of research, institution, year of defense, education level, thematic focus, genre work (report experience or research), guiding and initial training. The results showed that the RS has 12 PPG distributed in 14 universities, 6 private and 8 public, , academic courses of master's were 6, 8 courses were professional type and doctorates were found 6. It was found a production of 679 documents, 671 dissertations and 8 theses, with a predominance of qualitative researches (59.8%). The bigger part of academic production occurred in public universities. Regarding the studies that are part of the area of teaching of Science and Mathematics (624 documents), there was a greater number of studies in Mathematics (43.3%), followed by biology (24.8%), Physics (21.3%) and Chemistry (7.4%) containing a variety of subareas. It was identified that there is a concern of researchers related to the teaching-learning process, and teaching strategies, through the thematic focus "content-method" (28%). There was a higher concentration of works on high school level (42.3%) and basic education (final series) with 21.5%. It can be concluded that the academic researches of the graduate programs of RS are following the trend of the Brazilian educational production, but have some peculiarities, showing the importance of developing studies on the work done in each region of Brazil.