EVALUATION OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNICAL LABORATORY SKILLS OF STUDENTS OF SECONDARY TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN CHEMISTRY
Technical education. Laboratory skills. Rasch model
Technical skills are among the desired competencies in the Professional and Technological Education, in which students have the opportunity to develop or improve them in the laboratory space. This research, inserted in the research line “Educational practices and Educational technologies”, have investigated the technical skills through the procedures performed by participants in a technique for preparing solutions. The work aimed to contribute to the understanding of the processes of assessment of laboratory technical skills developed by students of Secondary Technical Education. Based on the assumption that technical laboratory skills are latent traits in the training process of the professionalization of subjects, their assessment can be a difficult problem for teachers of technical-professionalizing disciplines, such as those offered in secondary level technical courses, due to the difficulty of measuring an attribute that is not directly visible. However, the possibility of measuring the performance of technical skills through observable variables, indicators of this attribute, is considered, using analysis models that combine qualitative and quantitative aspects, such as the dichotomous statistical model developed by the Danish mathematician Georg Rasch (1901-1980). The work was based on a qualitative-quantitative methodology, for which a checklist-type instrument was developed from a laboratory document of the technical-professionalizing disciplines of the Technical Course in Chemistry at CEFET-MG, called Operational Procedure Standard for preparing solutions and for carrying out mass measurements. The checklist was completed through observation, accompanied by video recordings of classes developed in one of the teaching laboratories of the Technical Course in Chemistry on campus 1 of CEFET-MG. The data generated by filling out the checklist were validated using Rasch's dichotomous statistical model, to build interval measures of technical skills. The instrument proved to be valid for measuring the technical laboratory skills of Secondary Technical Education students in technical-professional subjects. Thus, it is considered that the use of this instrument could constitute an adequate tool to assess the development of this type of skill and, consequently, the student's learning in the school laboratory environment.