Análise de metodologia baseada no sistema personalizado de instrução num curso introdutório de eletromagnetismo

Abstract

Despite being essential for apprenticeship, the stimulus to the student’s active posture (versus the listener’s one), the respect to the individual learning pace, the formative evaluations and the supply of systematic feedback to the student are frequently outside the classrooms in schools and colleges. A strategy to bring such characteristics to the classrooms is through individualized teaching. One of the individualized teaching procedures most documented and applied is Fred S. Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction (PSI). Intensively used in the 70‟s, thousands of articles were published about PSI, giving vast empirical evidence about its results, which, in general, is superior to other forms of teaching. In spite of that, the application of this method began to decline in the 80‟s. Among the reasons for that, it’s possible to highlight the amount of initial efforts that were necessary to build a course based on the PSI, the possible resistance from teachers and educators due to the change in the teacher’s role from knowledge transmitter to advisor and the necessary logistics to provide a systematic feedback to students. It’s also worth to emphasize that, independently from which factors contributed to the decline in the usage of PSI, its efficiency is unquestionable. At the present work, an individualized teaching methodology based on the PSI was analyzed and experimented in an introductory course of electromagnetism for Physics students at the third college semester at the Federal University of Pará (Brazil). This methodology employed some of the characteristics of the PSI, respecting the features of the subject like the presence of long calculations and absence of tutors. There was evidence that, despite the introduced modifications, the application of the methodology may bring many of the positive results obtained with the application of the PSI.