EXPERIMENTAÇÃO NO ENSINO DE CIÊNCIAS: RELAÇÃO ENTRE CONCEPÇÕES DE ESTUDANTES E PROFESSORES SOBRE CIÊNCIAS E ATIVIDADES EXPERIMENTAIS

Experimental activities play a particular role in the teaching and learning of the natural sciences.Several studies focused on this topic to establish its specificities, objectives and implications. Thisarticle aims to present the results of a bibliographic review on the conception of students andteachers about experimental activities in Science teaching and learning. For this purpose, we carriedout a preliminary and non-systematic mapping on the subject in the Google Scholar bibliographicdatabase. The publications were analyzed using assumptions from Content Analysis. The analysisof the publications led to the following results: i) the conceptions about the characteristics ofscience are often naive, referring to idealistic or empirical visions about scientific activity,notwithstanding the age group or level of education of the subjects; ii) although students andteachers show common points regarding the characteristics of science, the subjects' conceptionstend to become more comprehensive along their formative path; iii) and, finally, although theresults reported in the literature are not consensual, some studies indicate that the strategies andactions developed by teachers reflect their epistemological conceptions concerning science. Resultsobtained reveal that students' and teachers' conceptions about the role of experimentation in scienceinfluence the planning and execution of the didactic sequence in which the experiment is inserted.These results allow stating that this review article can contribute to the deepening of the reflectionon important aspects inherent to the insertion of experimental activities in science teaching andlearning process.