Abstract

ALVARADO RODRIGUEZ, María Eugenia  and  FLORES-CAMACHO, Fernando. Personal views and suppositions about teaching sciences: The conceptions of university researchers. Perfiles educativos [online]. 2010, vol.32, n.128, pp.10-26. ISSN 0185-2698.

This article presents the results of a study that involves researchers in several scientific areas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (National Autonomous University of Mexico) with regard to their conceptions about teaching science at the university. It is part of a wider study about the origin and the development of the conceptions about science that prevail amongst the researchers in sciences. It offers a short overview about the educational research on teaching sciences and afterwards presents the ideas expressed by several researchers about teaching and learning sciences, such as ideas and views about the teachers training and updating, the lack of connection between teaching and research, the infrastructure and economic problems and other obstacles for teaching sciences. In the central part of this work the authors show the kind of ideas shown by the researchers about teaching sciences and they propose a critical and comparative analysis of such ideas and conceptions. They also show the problems that underlie naive conceptions about the teaching and learning processes and they emphasize some of the implications around the difficulties in improving scientific education at the university.

Keywords : Research in education; Science; Higher education; Conceptions about science; Mexico.