PREDICT, OBSERVE AND EXPLAIN (POE):

ACTIVE METHODOLOGY FOR TEACHING NUCLEAR RADIATION IN THE PANDEMIC

Abstract

One of the biggest questions asked by authors in the last five years is: How has the construction of curricular guidelines and architectures been taking place, admitting the relationship between school education and professionalization in view of everyday life after basic education and the labor market? This question needs to be problematized, seeking theoretical and practical answers in a context in which the guidelines for secondary education are re-discussed with the arrival of the Common National Curricular Base (BNCC). In this text, we are going to approach the professional course integrated to the Medium and a topic of the Natural Sciences curriculum that was emphasized by the BNCC: the concept of Nuclear Radiation and its implications in human life. On the other hand, Radiation, which has been worked on in the teaching of Physics and Chemistry in High School, needs attention because it is a subject that is little studied, in a way that does not favor critical reasoning. When approaching the subject, it is necessary to bring out the participation of the students, promoting protagonism and meaningful learning, making them reflect on their own learning process when they are put in conflict with their own reasoning through the mediation of the teacher, since that the subject carries a lot of negative charge, often relating it to something dangerous due to the context of accidents in nuclear power plants and bombs. The Predizer, Observe and Explain (POE) methodology was chosen to develop this work in the midst of a new teaching modality, Remoto, which allowed us to create the conflict of ideas in the classroom, typical of an active methodology. This seeks to escape the traditional style of experiments, in which the student just follows a script and makes observations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not possible to carry out any experiment in a laboratory, so the observation part of the POE was done by virtual experiment and the student was able to have contact with the scientific phenomenon even remotely. The use of this methodology allowed us to compare the results of Predict and Explain, which were systematized into speech categories and allowed us to perceive how effective the learning was, making it possible to trace which points are more fragile and easier to assimilate the concepts.