Resumo Este artigo descreve um estudo de aula realizado com cinco professoras do 5.° e 6.° ano numa escola de Lisboa, analisando episódios especialmente relevantes. O nosso objetivo é compreender as potencialidades do estudo de aula como processo de desenvolvimento profissional e os desafios que se colocam à sua realização. Os resultados mostram que as professoras, depois de alguma estranheza inicial com o formato da formação, envolveram-se fortemente na resolução de tarefas matemáticas e na exploração de questões como a natureza das tarefas e os processos de raciocínio dos alunos. As professoras evidenciam diversas aprendizagens profissionais por si realizadas, valorizando em especial as discussões coletivas na sala de aula, e destacam o trabalho colaborativo e a oportunidade para se constituírem num grupo de trabalho na escola.

Mechanistic reasoning is a powerful form of reasoning central to scientific explanations. Despite mechanistic reasoning being an important dimension of scientific practice and a central dimension of science curricula, students face difficulties in developing such type of reasoning. Many authors have been proposing tools for supporting its development; drawing is one such tool. Studies that purposefully explore how drawing leverages and supports students' mechanistic reasoning while engage in a process of constructing explanations are still scarce. The goal of the current study was to understand how students' mechanistic reasoning emerges and is enacted when students are jointly involved in drawing creation. For that, we drew on a recent framework that identifies essential characteristics of students' mechanistic reasoning and also on theories of distributed and embodied cognition. In this paper, we present a pair of middle school students who jointly explain a chemical phenomenon by creating drawings and reasoning with them. Using a fine‐grain analysis we examined the elements of students' mechanistic reasoning in relation to drawing creation and how talk and embodied actions on and with the drawings were used to support students' reasoning. Findings reveal that drawings played a key role in paving the way for students reasoning about mechanisms and in enacting mechanistic reasoning. In particular, drawings were essential for pushing students to look for a mechanism, for enabling and supporting mechanistic reasoning‐in‐action, and for facilitating productive interactions between the students that ended up in the construction of a sophisticated mechanistic explanation.

This study aims to explore how a learning sequence designed with an Integrated STEAM Education perspective (iSTEAM) contributes to students’ levels of creativity. The participants in this study were students from 9th and 10th grade with ages between 14 and 16 years old. Students were challenged to produce a soundtrack for an animation video. This was achieved by building artifacts and using the phenomena of physics under study (mechanical energy) to produce sound effects. These were later digitally recorded and assembled to build the video’s soundtrack. This research work contributes to addressing the importance of STEAM education integration and of digital competence in developing students’ creativity in problem solving.

O estudo de aula é um processo formativo que leva os professores a refletirem, através de um trabalho eminentemente colaborativo, sobre a sua prática profissional. Trata-se de uma experiência que envolve três momentos principais: planejamento, observação da aula, e reflexão pós-aula e seguimento. O seu objetivo é criar condições para uma maior compreensão dos processos de raciocínio dos alunos por parte dos professores e, assim, contribuir para o seu desenvolvimento profissional. Neste artigo, analisamos as possibilidades formativas dos estudos de aula no que se refere às aprendizagens profissionais dos professores relativas à prática letiva, com enfoque na seleção de tarefas e na análise do raciocínio dos alunos, bem como à sua visão da colaboração e reflexão profissional. Para isso, seguiu-se uma metodologia qualitativa e interpretativa, tendo por base a observação participante. O estudo de aula que apresentamos decorreu num Agrupamento de Escolas, situado numa zona rural, e envolveu cinco professoras dos primeiros anos e uma equipe do Instituto de Educação. Os resultados reforçam a ideia de que os estudos de aula podem proporcionar aos professores um olhar mais atento sobre a natureza das tarefas a propor em sala de aula e levá-los a valorizar mais os processos de raciocínio dos seus alunos. Além disso, este trabalho evidencia o contributo do estudo de aula para o desenvolvimento de um trabalho colaborativo entre professores e para a sua valorização da reflexão.

Integrated STEM education (iSTEM) has attracted attention due to its potentialities regarding students’ learning and intentions to pursue STEM-related careers. However, although increasingly popular, iSTEM remains challenging and elusive, particularly from teachers’ perspective. This scenario became even more complex with the inclusion of “A”, from the Arts. Considering that the quality of teachers is decisive in the success of integrated STEAM education (iSTEAM), it is essential to provide teachers with opportunities to develop their Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for iSTEAM. In this work, the aim was to understand the effect of teacher professional development (TPD) within iSTEAM on the development of Physics teachers’ PCK related to the topic of “Electrical circuits with associations in series and parallel”. This study followed a pre-test/post-test design with a single group, which facilitates the subsequent comparison of participants’ reported PCK before and after their involvement in the TPD. The results showed that the TPD had a favorable impact on teachers’ PCK. The results of this study also contribute to defining a specific PCK for STEAM (STEAM-PCK).