Portfolio: A tool for the accommodation of the new scientific concepts
Tipo
Artigo de evento
Data de publicação
2006
Periódico
CHISA 2006 - 17th International Congress of Chemical and Process Engineering
Citações (Scopus)
0
Autores
Gouvea M.T.
Casella E.L.
Jorge R.M.M.
Casella E.L.
Jorge R.M.M.
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Título de Volume
Membros da banca
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Resumo
Abstract. Some of the well-known competencies of a 21st century engineer include the ability of writing reports; of accurately observing and discussing physical phenomena; of constructing and applying scientific theories. In order to acquire these abilities, the student must be able to turn down the common sense knowledge to solve problems and explain phenomena. Instead of it, he must know how to use accepted scientific paradigms. According to current pedagogical paradigms, the student acquires autonomous thinking when taking active part in the learning process and if construction of new concepts is performed in a way significant to him. Moreover, the student will accommodate a new concept after suffering a cognitive conflict, i.e., he must perceive that his current knowledge is not able to explain or solve a given phenomenon. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to thoroughly plan how to introduce and develop each disciplinary content, providing the students directions for their continuous learning and construction of an autonomous scientific thinking. In this paper, we present our constructivist strategy currently applied to the courses Transport Phenomena I and II. It makes use of a portfolio as a tool for establishing an interaction between students and instructors and also as a tool for performing a continuous evaluation of the learning process. In the portfolios, the students are asked to record their observations during class-performed experiments, doubts, beliefs, thinking hypotheses, collections of data, problem resolutions and reflections on suggested readings. Working with the portfolio during the classes showed us that all students that committed themselves in the activity, learned new scientific concepts more quickly and meaningfully. These students better accommodated new scientific concepts and this process could be assessed by their good performance in all exams and tasks assigned to them.
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Assuntos Scopus
Autonomous thinking , Cognitive conflict , Portfolio , Scientific concepts