AS SÉRIES DE INVESTIGAÇÃO CRIMINAL NO ENSINO DA QUÍMICA POR MEIO DA EXPERIMENTAÇÃO INVESTIGATIVA E LÚDICA.

Conventional methods employed to teach chemistry imply a lot of memorization and very little contextualization, i.e., they fail to connect chemistry concepts to students' everyday lives, which causes them to lose motivation and interest in learning the subject. In order to change this scenario, new methods have been proposed for the teaching of chemistry, such as playful experimentation, to foster contextualization of content and integration with content from other subjects. This study has aimed to evaluate student learning of chemistry concepts by means of experimentation associated to forensic science. To this end, first, students' previous knowledge of the content was assessed by means of a questionnaire prior to the intervention. Then, they were given a problem-situation, a fictitious crime, which they had to solve. The results indicate that the teaching method under investigation is an effective teaching-learning strategy capable of contextualizing and adapting chemistry concepts to students' cultural background, since TV crime series have become hugely popular among teenagers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]