Brasil Final Report - Department of Physics - The Ohio State University

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Another program, ProInfo, begun in 1997, built upon previous initiatives in teacher training
by running state-administered, lato sensu courses as joint ventures with the universities. This
program, still in existence today, aims to make IT universally available in state schools. Some of the
goals set in 1997 and 1998 were to have 100,000 computers in schools, 200 Centers of Educational
Technology and to provide training for 25,000 teachers.
Despite the efforts of the ProInfo Program and the funds invested, the use of new
technologies is still mainly restricted to the use of computers and videos in education, because
students’ access to the Internet is still very limited. A description of the current situation regarding
the use of new technologies in schools would be that there are IT laboratories, chiefly in the
independent schools; computer use is related neither to the curriculum nor to the teacher’s work; the
computer is used mainly for computer-literacy and learning reinforcement.
Educational Use of New Technologies
One of the factors that influence the use of new technologies in education is the contribution
of research to new theories concerning human cognition. An important milestone was reached with
the migration from a behaviourist to a constructivist paradigm. Constructivism applied to
instructional design changed the role of the computer in education: the computer was no longer “a
tutor”, as it had been under the behaviourist paradigm. Educational approaches derived from
Constructivism, as exemplified by Cognitive Flexibility Theory (Spiro et al, 1992) and Situated
Cognition (Brown et al., 1989) are also employed to guide the development of constructivist
learning environments and hypermedia systems. A common aspect among these frameworks is the
use of technology to simulate reality.
Constructivist learning environments challenge students to collaborate in seeking solutions to
real-life problems (Brown et al., 1989, Wilson, 1996). These environments can provide realistic
simulations using videodiscs or virtual reality in which students have to solve scientific problems as
if they really were scientists. Students engage in the problem, gather data, formulate hypotheses for
its solution and come to decisions and make judgements.
The design of hypermedia systems can be well-suited to the kinds of “landscape crisscrossing”
as recommended by Cognitive Flexibility Theory and needed in ill-structured domains, as
they can provide rearranged instructional sequences, multiple dimensions of knowledge
representation and multiple interconnections across knowledge components, as provided by the
following elements (Jacobson, 1994):
(i) Cases and rich examples;
(ii) Multiple forms of knowledge representation;
(iii) Link abstract concepts to case examples;
(iv) Demonstrate conceptual and thematic variability in ill-structured domains;
(v) Interrelated and web-like nature of knowledge;
(vi) Knowledge assembly from different conceptual/thematic and case resources;
(vii) Promote active learning.
Although all these resources are available, little attention is being paid to the educational use of new
technologies (including video) either by physics education researchers or by physics teachers in this
subject, a fact reflected in the low number of papers being presented at recent Brazilian conferences
on physics or science education (Table 1).