Epistemological profile of chemical bonding : evaluation of knowledge construction in high school.

Abstract

This work aims to evaluate the evolution of chemical bonding concepts of high school students at public schools in southern Brazil. For this, we built the epistemological profile of each student who took part in a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) about this topic, based on the foundations of Bachelard’s theory. Following the principles of the qualitative survey, we applied questionnaires to monitor the students’ ideas. The results revealed that the construction of knowledge took place by overcoming epistemological obstacles linked to the realist and empiricist philosophical zones. Most students (55.2%) presented a mostly rationalist profile at the end of the research, but misconceptions already found in the literature constitute strong barriers to the construction of knowledge, among which the nature of chemical bonds and chemical stability stand out.