Anàlisi de l’explicació atòmica de la química escolar mitjançant una proposta didàctica basada en la Història de la Ciència

Abstract

We can always see in science classes how pupils blame for the excessive difficulty to understand the atomic theory they’ve learnt in class. This atomic theory, textbook based, consists principally in a “physical” atom supported on Rutherford and other contemporary scientists. They can’t be easily related with chemical reactions. Is it possible to complement this “particle – atom” giving it more chemical entity to get a better learning of this “chemical atom” by the pupils? This is the way that we’ve choose to “walk” in this research with the concourse of an “actor” which we think so important: the History of Science. The History of Science makes possible that students take care about making how difficult was developing a new theory or a new scientific concept and, more important, how much imagination and creativity was needed to do it. The atomic theory in textbooks is showed under “the umbrella” of the “particle – atom”, lowering that creativity to a couple of memoristic algorisms to solve mathematic problems. Anyway, using History of Science improves another basic topic of science learning which we want to give relevance: how students can receive a “social” image of science. If we want to study how chemical atom was developed throughout history, we’ll think that it should be a helpful item for its learning understanding which items modulate how we “do science”. The main point of our research will be the design of a TLS based in History of Science. At first, we’ll analyse a couple of textbooks to find some “master guidelines” for our design. Next, we’ll implement that TLS in a group of Chemistry of 1st of Bachelor at Catalonia Open Institute (IOC) and also we did a exploratory implementation in INS El Cairat. Then, we’ll analyse which variables “play” in our learning process of chemical atom. Finally, we’ll reread the same textbooks of the first step with our “new look” to define the textbook “typical explanation” of atom and, at last, comparing it with our proposal. [-]

Date of Award	18 Nov 2015
Original language	English
Supervisor	Merce Izquierdo Aymerich (Director)