ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIONS IN CHEMICAL EXPERIMENTS IN TEXTBOOKS

Abstract

Chemistry Textbooks (DLs) are important tools for the teaching and learning process in Basic Education. They are often the main teaching material used by teachers in the classroom and, therefore, are of great relevance for research in the educational area. In this sense, this research aims to understand how the different forms of representation are arranged in the experimental activities, over two chapters present in the chemistry LDs approved by the PNLD of 2018. To achieve this objective, we used the theoretical assumptions of the analysis as a methodology of content. We observed that the themes introduction to chemistry and substances and mixtures and the theme solutions are the ones that present the most experimental activities in volumes 1 and 2, respectively. Furthermore, we verified that there are experimental activities with more than one type of representation and there are activities that present a single representation, but that ask students to build other forms of representation, such as the construction of graphs and tables. Throughout the chapters, we found that the authors bring enough representations that accompany the written text and, in some exercises, use images for resolution, as well as, there are representations that address the three levels of chemical thinking. Although the analyzed chapters and experimental scripts use representations and these are integrated into the activity and/or written text, it is still necessary that authors use more forms of representations and that they present the function of helping to understand scientific concepts.