O ENEM, o vestibular e o ensino de química : o caso da Universidade Estadual de Londrina

Abstract

In this research we investigate two evaluation processes, namely Vestibular and Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM), used as entrance examinations to the course of Chemistry in State University of Londrina (UEL - Paraná - Brazil). Until 2008, only the Vestibular was used in this selection, but since 2009 the score of ENEM has also been used to fill the vacancies remaining after the results of the Vestibular. In this way, from this year on, UEL has two evaluative instruments to select students for its undergraduate courses. In view of this, we propose here to investigate the questions of these two examinations the years 2009 to 2011, according to four criteria: the knowledge/chemical content needed for their resolution; the skills/abilities they require; their contextual aspects and the types of representations used in the preparation of the questions. Furthermore, we investigate which ideas of teaching and learning underlie the evaluative practice of these tests and their implications for teaching chemistry. As this is a qualitative research, we adopted here the textual discourse and content analysis methods. With the analysis of the questions, and based on official documents which govern the tests, we found that in terms of knowledge/chemical content the ENEM's questions include topics related to everyday application of scientific knowledge and social and environmental problems, with no explicit correspondents in the Vestibular questions. Regarding the abilities and skills, in the ENEM they are diversified and broadly required, while in the Vestibular, we have identified a predominance of skills/abilities based on the use of codes and chemical nomenclature, without complex analogies with other aspects. Concerning the contexts, significant differences were founded in the two tests. While 98% of the ENEM's questions of Chemistry present some kind of context, focusing mainly on social, environmental problems and questions related to technology, 41% of the Vestibular questions have no reference to any context. As for types of representations, 50% of the questions in both tests presents some kind of representations, however, in ENEM all the listed ones (layout, chemical structure, chemical equation, figure, graphic, table, frame and cartoons) are included while schemes and cartoons were not founded in Vestibular. Concerning to ideas of teaching and learning expressed in these evaluations, most questions of the Vestibular has a reproductive character, requiring only memorization of definitions and examples while in the ENEM there is a predominance of productive questions, characterized by the presence of some context. Concerning the implications of these tests on Chemistry's teaching, we highlight the need for studies about its purposes, since they have been used also to induce changes in curricula adopted in Universities.