Science education in Brazil study of research in postgraduate programs in Capes Area 46 (2001-2018)

Abstract

In Brazil, research in the field of Science Education was mostly linked to Education Postgraduate Programs until the end of the 1990s. In 2000, with the creation of the Science and Mathematics Teaching area at CAPES, the current Teaching Area (Area 46), much of this production was transferred to the programs in this new area. The aim of this paper is to analyze academic research in Science Education in Brazil, produced in CAPES Area 46 postgraduate programs. Under methodological aspects, this is a “state of the art” research. Our documentary corpus was obtained from the Science Teaching Documentation Center (CEDOC) of the Education’ Faculty at UNICAMP. The research found 4,078 dissertations and theses in Science Education defended from 2001 to 2018, and exclusively linked to programs in Area 46. The following results were obtained: 53.7% of production took place in public higher education institutions, in academic master’s degrees (56.3%), followed by professional master’s degrees (31.1%) and academic doctorates (12.6%); there was greater production in the years 2014, 2016, 2017 and 2018, relative to the period considered; research focused mainly on topics in the fields of Physics (20.2%), Biology (12.7%), Chemistry (10.8%) and general approaches (24.5%). Production is more concentrated on secondary education (50.7%) and on proposing/applying/evaluating teaching methods and strategies and resources to support teaching, thematic focuses that represent 56.5% of the total number of papers.