O desempenho em física dos alunos de Santarém (PA) que prestaram o ENEM 2019: análise psicométrica utilizando a teoria clássica dos testes e a teoria de resposta ao item.

Abstract

Physics is still seen by many students as a diffiult subject to be learned. On the other hand, research shows the diffiulties encountered by teachers when they try to bring scientifi concepts closer to the reality experienced by students to make the teaching of this area more dynamic. In addition, some authors point out that, currently, the teaching of Physics in High School has focused much more on problem-solving focused on the selection processes for entry into higher education - than on learning and understanding physical phenomena. It is known that the National High School Exam, which was initially used only as an educational assessment, is currently the second-largest exam in the world for entry into higher education. Therefore, the results of these exams are important sources of data to analyze the student’s performance in several knowledge areas after they fiish high school. And in this sense, aiming to understand what is the performance of students from Santarém in relation to Physics content, this research used data from Enem 2019, and thus a psychometric analysis was performed, through the Classical Test Theory (CTT) and the Item Response Theory (IRT), in order to analyze the performance of students living in Santarém and who took the Physics test of Enem 2019. The results show that the average score of the 11,624 students who took the exam was only 22.56%. This result, although low and problematic, does not differ much from the national average shown in other studies, which highlight the low results obtained by students in Physics items, as well as in the tests of Nature Sciences and its Technologies (NS), which is composed of items of Physics, Biology, and Chemistry. The fidings of this research also revealed that in Enem 2019, the results obtained by students in the NS test were as low as the results of the specifi items of Physics, which is even worse among candidates with lower family income, and the opposite is also true: students with higher family income obtained higher scores in the NS test. Part of this poor result may also be because some items are failing to adequately assess students, since the results of the IRT analysis show that several items have low discrimination power, that is, they fail to adequately assess students who have the ability - to answer that item - from those who do not.