Abstract

SILVA, Alcina Maria Testa Braz da  and  MAZZOTTI, Tarso Bonilha. A física pelos professores de física: a contribuição da teoria das representações sociais. Ciência educ. [online]. 2009, vol.15, n.03, pp.515-528. ISSN 1516-7313.

The perspective of Social Psychology, approached from the social representations theory angle, introduces a new form of looking at the discussion about the students’ alternative conceptions. With this in mind, I analyse the original results of research conducted in 1996, which identified the elements that compose the field of representation of the social aspect physical science by teachers who taught this subject to students of the secondary school level. In the afore mentioned research, 66 semi-structured interviews were made with teachers from 17 public schools of the city of Rio de Janeiro. The theory/methodology adopted was the thematic analysis of contents, with the support of the Data Collector (for HyperCard, Macintosh) software for text documentation and using the approach of the social representations. The outcomes of this research indicated the presence of two poles of representation: i) critical realism, based on a contemporary vision of the sciences, and ii) naive realism, which comprises the majority of the interviewed teachers, supported by intuitive ideas.

Keywords : Physics Education; Preconceptions; Social Representations.

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