Sentidos subjetivos de estudantes do ensino médio: o uso das tecnologias digitais para estudar biologia

Abstract

Digital Technologies (TD) have been often used in society and in school. In general, researches focuses TD as tools that emphasize cognitive processes. In this paper I support that high school students, as digital natives, produce subjective meanings for the use of TD in various contexts, including to study biology, favoring the motivation and learning of this discipline. Inspired by the Theory of Subjectivity proposed by González Rey, I aimed to understand the subjective meanings of high school students related to the uses of TD to study Biology. I conducted the study with four students of the third year of high school, from a federal school, in Belém do Pará. I followed the orientation of Qualitative Epistemology, which values the construction and interpretation of information by the researcher, the dialogical interaction with the research subjects and the recognition of singularity as an instance of production of scientific knowledge. Students provided information through writing, sentence complements, and informal conversations. From the information obtained in these instruments, I organized the case studies of the four subjects, constructing indicators of subjective meanings and trying to understand how they were configured for each subject. The results indicate that young students produce configurations of singular subjective meanings for the use of TD. Then I constructed categories and subcategories, bringing the senses closer to the four subjects. I found that TD meet important needs of adolescents. They use TD outside of school to interact, have fun or satisfy curiosity, and escape from loneliness. At school, they also use to interact, have fun or satisfy curiosity and to access information quickly. Specifically to study biology, students use TD to interact, fix or memorize content, to understand or satisfy curiosity, to complement or deepen content, and to extrapolate a particular theme to another context. These meanings range from those that emphasize the reproduction of content to those that facilitate learning. In addition, students use TD with some care, aware that they can aid studies and interactions, but also harms them. Therefore, the results support the assertion that the subjective meanings of the use of TD to study biology favor the motivation and learning of this discipline, but other results recommend caution regarding the types of motivation and learning that these uses can provide.