Abstract

MARTINS, Iva; BAPTISTA, Mónica  and  TOME, Inês. STEM education in the development of cognitive structures about energy transformations: a study with 9th grade students. Rev. Port. de Educação [online]. 2023, vol.36, n.2, e23032.  Epub July 31, 2023. ISSN 0871-9187.  https://doi.org/10.21814/rpe.25599.

The concept of energy, although a central concept in Science teaching, is an abstract concept, whose understanding poses many challenges and difficulties to students. Likewise, the phenomena associated with this concept, namely energy transformations, are particularly difficult for most students. Thus, this study aimed to know the effect of a STEM activity (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), for the teaching, in a formal context, of the topic “Energy Transformations”, in the cognitive structures of 31 students attending the 9th grade. The study followed a pre-test and post-test design, with a single group. Data collection was performed through a word association test (WAT), with six stimulus words, before and after the activity. The results obtained allowed the construction of tables of frequencies and maps of the cognitive structures of the students in the two distinct moments. In addition, and as a way of revealing the nature of the word associations made by the students, they were asked to write sentences with the associated words. The analysis of the results was performed considering the associations most frequently made by the students (i.e., based on the type and frequencies of the response words) and their nature (i.e., based on the sentences written by the students). Considering the results and their analysis, it is possible to conclude that there was an evolution of the cognitive structures of the students, which is indicative that their involvement in the STEM activity promoted the construction of a more in-depth knowledge about the contents in question.

Keywords : Cognitive structures; Science education; STEM education; Word association test (WAT); Energy transformations..

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