O Perfil e a Percepção do Aprendizado Significativo dos Alunos do Curso Noturno de Ciências Ambientais de uma Universidade Pública Brasileira

Abstract

Teaching strategies focused on the student seem to be more attractive to the active learning of undergraduate night shift students. Studies carried out until the beginning of the 2000s revealed that the profile of the evening course student was composed mostly of student-workers. However, with the expansion of vacancies for access to federal higher education institutions (IFES) within the scope of the Support Program for the Restructuring and Expansion Plans of Federal Universities - REUNI, the profile of young people entering higher education has undergone significant changes. In order to supply the lack of more recent studies addressing this new profile of the night student at a public university, our objective was to evaluate the profile and the perception of the student's learning in an evening course in Environmental Sciences at a Brazilian IFES. This article describes the results of exploratory research by analyzing a structured questionnaire applied to 245 students regularly enrolled in the evening course in Environmental Sciences at a Brazilian IFES. With a total of 103 responses, we concluded that the Environmental Science student staff of this IFES is composed of young women (61.2%) between 18 and 25 years old (75.7%), without formal employment (66.9%), who prefer studying in the night shift (56.3%), take more than an hour to travel to the study site (53%). The analysis of learning perception revealed that 75.7% of these students prefer active learning as an alternative to the traditional passive teaching method. Although these students are not student-workers, as traditionally described for the night shift, the traditional expository teaching method was not attractive to these young people. We expect this study to contribute to data that meets the needs of these young students.