CONSTRUCTION OF GRAPHICS IN CHEMISTRY: AN ESSENTIAL COMPETENCE IN INVESTIGATIVE ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Teaching processes that promote knowledge integration must consider the relevance of graphical literacy, an essential competence to investigative activities in natural science education. The aim of this study is to analyze the treatment given to the domain of construct-ing graphics in the official documents related to scholar curriculum in Brazil and to debate it at the light of classroom practices. So, the recent literature on the topic is analyzed, as well as Brazilian official pedagogical orientations. Also, an activity on graphical construc-tion was proposed to high school students and a teacher was interviewed. The results ob-tained indicate a twilight zone for graphical construction in the official documents, which extends to teaching training and reflects into classroom practices, creating a vicious circle composed by the incongruence in the orientations, limitations in teaching training and therefore in students’ learning, which demonstrate a heuristic and a superficial vision of graphical construction when solving Chemistry problems. The implications of these results point out the urge to broaden this debate in order to include this topic in teaching training undergraduate programs, besides emphasizing the exploration of this issue in the classroom. Keywords: chemistry teaching, construction of graphics, graphical literacy.