Estudo das concepções de professores da área de ciências naturais sobre as interações entre ciência, tecnologia e sociedade
Resumo
The current study is intended to investigate the conceptions of a group of Science
(elementary) and Biology (high school) teachers who work in public schools (municipal and
state) in the city of São Carlos about the Science, Technology and Society (STS) interactions.
The relevance of this study lies on the fact that in the present world Science and Technology,
with their developments and influences in the human, social, cultural and economical
dimensions, have turned to be objects of debates regarding their potentialities, natures and
limits, due to many factors, including their impacts on the well-being of society. So, it s
considered that the understanding of the nature of science and STS interactions by both the
teachers and the students is one of the essential aspects of the scientific literacy, indispensable
to a critical and responsible evaluation of the scientific and technological policies. In this
study, a qualitative approach has been used to interpret the data collected. The data was
obtained by means of the application of, the VOSTS (Views on Science-Technology-Society)
questionnaire to a group of elementary and high school Natural Science teachers. They were
also submitted to a semi-structured interview with questions based on the VOSTS. The
VOSTS questionnaire was applied in an abridged and adapted version. The answers of this
version were categorized as realist, plausible and simplistic by Human, Natural and Exact
Sciences researchers/professors. The results also show that the participating teachers of this
study have some misconceptions about the STS interactions, including these ones:
Technology is Science application; Science is a group of information; experiments and
observations; Science is a technique for practical problem solving; Science is indefinable;
every technological knowledge constitutes itself a single scientific discovery.