BIOCHEMISTRY IN HIGH SCHOOL: A PROPOSAL FOR ASSESSING SIGNIFICANT LEARNING USING CONCEPTUAL MAPS AND FORUMS
collaborative learning, online assessment, rubrics, concept map, discussion forums.
Biochemistry is an area of study that involves knowledge of Biology and Chemistry, focusing on the “Chemistry of Living Beings”. This area of knowledge addresses topics that are not easy to represent, which creates difficulties for students to understand, and is also neglected by teachers. Another difficulty detected in schools today is the reduced use of collaborative activities during classes, which sometimes leaves students isolated, limiting their learning. In addition to the previously mentioned difficulties, it is observed that the advances in Digital Technologies that are already inserted in today's society, and, therefore, schools are constantly challenged to introduce these technologies in classes in order to improve the teaching and learning process, the quality of the classes, as well as aligning them with the students' reality regarding the use of Digital Technologies. Considering the difficulties of learning Biochemistry and the proper and efficient insertion of Digital Technologies in schools, another major challenge arises: the assessment of learning in the online context. Thus, this research had as a guiding question the verification of evidence of significant learning in the collaborative activities of high school students using concept maps and online discussion forums. Conceptual maps are graphic schemes that assist in the representation of knowledge present in the individual's cognitive structure, facilitating their externalization. Discussion forums, on the other hand, allow collaborative activities between subjects, promoting dialogue in order to generate additional knowledge. This work consisted of: Planning activities, online classes (about the “Proteins” concept, construction of concept maps and use of discussion forums in Virtual Environment, instructions for using applications for construction of concept maps), construction of maps conceptual (individual and collaborative) hands-on and with the software Cmaptools, Lucidchart and Power Point and use of discussion forums in Virtual Learning Environment / Moodle and use of evaluation rubrics. Evaluation rubrics adapted from Biagiotti (2005), Cruz and Nunes (2009) and Martins and Alves (2016) were used to evaluate the discussion forums and Evaluation rubrics adapted from Biagiotti (2005) and Novak and Cañas (2010) to evaluate concept maps. This research aimed to build a proposal for procedural assessment of the learning of the “Proteins” concept, for High School, based on the combined use of concept maps and online discussion forums on the Moodle platform. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this research was developed entirely online, with 8 students from the 3rd year of high school, from a private school. The results point to the efficiency of collaborative activities in the learning process and the efficiency of the proposed procedural assessment model. At the end of the research, a Didactic Guide was prepared, in e-book format, as an Educational Product.