Abstract:

This work aims to present the results of a retrieval practice (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008; Karpicke, 2012). This research was carried out with 35 high school students from a brazilian public school who worked on the topic of energy conservation in a mini-course of 8 hours/class. Initially, the students were exposed to the traditional contents of kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy through the use of the Peer Instruction method (Mazur, 1997; Schell & Butler, 2018) during the application of a didactic sequence on the roller coaster problem.

The planning and implementation of the didactic sequence of the first seven classes followed the following organization:
1) the teacher presented a question in the form of a conceptual test;
2) the students thought individually about the answer;
3) the students voted for the first time;
4) students discussed and convinced their peers;
5) students voted a second time;
6) the teacher provided feedback on the answers;
7) the teacher explained the correct answer.

In the eighth class, the activity chosen as retrieval practice consisted of the painting “WaterFall” by Escher (1961). The choice of this painting is justified by the following aspects:
a) its theme is compatible with the physical concepts involved with mechanical energy and its conservation law studied;
b) there is a situation of violation of the law of conservation of energy;
c) the work has connotative potential, which means that it invites indirect associations, therefore, it does not explicitly denote the concepts studied.

As instrument of data collection, students were asked to write a dissertation that portrayed the painting as a case of violation of the law of conservation of energy. For data analysis and interpretation we used the contributions of Discursive Semiotics (Duval, 2004; Prain & Waldrip, 2006). We examined the elements of the different descriptive, narrative and discursive typologies, in the sense that they form a gradually more complex structure in order to establish levels of student learning according to the levels of responses used in the use of scientific concepts to interpret the work of art.
The results found showed that the discursive typology indicated a greater understanding of the content than narrative or descriptive forms. The transcoding task made possible by the artistic work allowed to correlate the content taught to the theme of the work. Furthermore, the results found corroborate the hypothesis that a teaching task based on a process of transcoding an artistic sign with potential application in the taught content tends to establish correspondence between the organizational complexity of the discursive composition elaborated by the student and its performance in the appropriation of the scientific knowledge taught. The benefits of applied retrieval practice were not limited to learning a specific response, but produced knowledge that could be transferred to another context.
Based on the conclusions drawn from this work, we seek to contribute to the advances in research in the area of physics teaching with regard to introduce retrieval practice to the understanding of the students' learning process in the classroom.

Keywords:

Retrieval-based learning, active learning, conservation of energy, physics teaching, high school.