Mapas conceituais como estratégia facilitadora de uma aprendizagem significativa de funções inorgânicas: possibilidades de uso do software Cmap Tools

Abstract

The difficulties for teaching Chemistry in high school are numerous. With regard to the concept of inorganic functions – content taught and learned during high school – there is a vast amount of rules and classifications that need to be understood by students, and which are sometimes difficult to be well explored and classified in this teaching. Based on this assumption, it is sometimes necessary to use computational tools that may help in the teaching and learning process of inorganic functions. From what has been exposed, the objective of this work is to use the Cmap Tools software for teaching inorganic functions in view of their main definitions and classifications. This software allows the creation of concept maps, which is a strategy that allows the development of intellectual, cognitive and organizational skills, só that general concepts are hierarchically connected, also linking specific concepts and ideas learned by students. In addition, the construction of concept maps also allows students to use and explore their prior knowledge in contrast to the knowledge built from inorganic functions classes, as well as helping to visualize in a broad sense what is being studied. The use of these concept maps is based on the theory of meaningful learning, woven by David Ausubel, which proposes that the basis of an individual’s learning process is the relationship between what he already knows – his previous knowledge – and what he will learn. By confronting new information with what the student already knows, new meanings are generated, as well as new understandings, which, in turn, result in the effectiveness of learning. In view of this type of meaningful learning, the methodology of this work focuses on exploratory research, mainly based on complete articles published in journals and events in the area of teaching Chemistry, in books and book chapters on the subject. The analysis tool of this research corpus will be the Discursive Textual Analysis (ATD). Thus, we believe that this work can contribute to Chemistry teachers in order to understand how the use of this software can favor the learning of inorganic functions and other chemical concepts, with this, it was possible to conclude that the Cmap Tools software is an excellent tool to assist in the teaching of inorganic functions from the construction of concept maps, as it is a free and easy-to-use free software, which can be used to reduce time the construction of concept maps and facilitate the understanding of inorganic functions.