Elementos para otimização do ensino em licenciaturas em função da percepção de formandos

Abstract

This research aimed at investigating instructional elements in teacher training undergraduate courses, subject to improvements from those course students’ perception. The research focused on students’ impression of teaching elements of teaching, namely: the content covered in the course; the interactions between professors and students; the demand of the course sudents constant dedication to studies; and the alignment between learning assessment and course content. The selection of such teaching elements was mainly based on the importance of interaction in the teaching profession (TARDIF; LASSARD, 2006), and, in particular, its communication elements in instruction (NÉRICI, 1985). It was also considered: content key role in order to reach certain objectives at the end of an educational process (LIBÂNEO, 2005; HAYDT, 2006; HIEBERT; MORRIS; BERK; JANSEN, 2007); the importance of the educational process proper organization at an appropriate threshold for the maintenance of the student’s learning effort, taking into account the level of mastery over skills acquisition (SOUZA; VALENTE, 2014; ROSA; GALVÃO, 2017), as well the importance of the information organization presented by professors (GOBET, 2005; LEE; ANDERSON, 2013); and evaluation as assistance for increased teaching and learning (VIANNA, 1989; PERRENOUD, 1999). The students’ answers to a set of questions selected from the student’s questionnaire, part of the National Student Performance Exam, were analyzed so that the answers related to this research elements of interest could be analyzed interdependently. The data analyzed were related to the years 2014 and 2017 for all the majors associated with teacher training, in general, and for the degree in Pedagogy, in particular, restricted to the Federal District. Using cluster analysis (FREI, 2016; KASSAMBARA, 2017), the undergraduates were segmented on the basis of the greater or lesser similarity between them, considering the answers to the selected items of the student’s questionnaire. Segmentation was defined using the Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) procedure, which had the input of a distance matrix from the observations calculated as proposed by Gower (1971) for mixed variables. In order to obtain the amount of clusters in which the data sets would be segmented, the Silhouette measure was used (KASSAMBARA, 2017). The analysis of the representative cases of the undergrates’ segments with more similar answers, for each data cut, allowed the identification of teaching elements which can be improved considering students’ perception, observing the dissonant behavior of some elements in relation to the ones analyzed: interactions between professors and students (for teacher training courses in general) can be improved so that undergraduate students can be better encouraged to study and learn; the alignment between learning assessments and course content (for Pedagogy courses, in particular) can be better demarcated so that the feedback process of teaching can be improved according to students’ needs.