Dificuldade de aprendizagem em física à luz da teoria da carga cognitiva

Abstract

Reports on learning difficulties in Physics, mainly related to specific concepts and requiring a high degree of abstraction, are common. Therefore, it is important to understand the perspectives of learning difficulties of the learners, how they think and face the learning process, making it possible to know how to progress, and this can provide information to assist the instructional process of the teacher. Therefore, the objective of this research was to investigate the perceptions of the apprentices of a licenciatura course in Physics about their difficulties in the disciplines and how these difficulties have been worked by them. The conceptions of learning difficulties were evidenced, in general, by means of a review of the literature on the subject and, in particular, an overview of research on learning difficulties in Physics was presented. The theoretical framework is articulated by two studies, one of them is Cognitive Load Theory, which presents an understanding model on the principles of human mind functioning, according to the human cognitive architecture; the other is Metacognition, which presents the learner's knowledge about his/her learning. The research was carried out with apprentices of the second, fourth, sixth and eighth periods of a bachelor's degree in Physics of a Federal University, and is qualitative. Data were collected through a semi-structured interview with apprentices and their perceptions were analyzed by the principles of Cognitive Load Theory. It was verified in which aspects their perspectives approach or distance themselves from what is presented by the researches in Physics Teaching related to the thematic and, also, if they present metacognitive knowledge. From the analysis, it was noticed that all people, at some point in their lives, experience learning difficulties. Considering this, it was concluded that the learners cannot demonstrate explicitly what their learning difficulties are, and in their discourses this inference seems to come from the social context in which they are inserted, in which difficulty is synonymous with failure. Nevertheless, it is possible to see indications that the level of experience of the apprentices participating in this research is little considered in the teaching and learning process, since it requires them, before they have the necessary level of experience, some knowledge of high level of complexity. Despite this, in a primary metacognitive process, the learners shown evidences that they had knowledge about what strategies might or might not facilitate their learning.