PROMOTING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN EXPERIENCE WITH SCIENTIFIC WRITING IN THE INORGANIC CHEMISTRY COURSE

Abstract

The student who has just entered higher education is faced with chemical knowledge that receives a much deeper treatment when compared to high school so that he is not always able to construct meanings for this knowledge. To help in this construction of meanings, we analyzed an experience in which students of an Inorganic Chemistry course were asked to produce a text based on the reading of a scientific divulgation text and to participate in the evaluation process of their colleagues’ texts. We observed a good involvement with the activity and the construction of relationships between the topic in question and the contents developed in the discipline, what contributed to improve the performance of the class. We argue that the involvement with creative writing of scientific texts should be encouraged throughout the entire undergraduate course.