Analysis of some variable in a thermodynamics text understanding

There is no doubt that a text-book is one of the most useful pedagogic resources in sciences teaching. The professor emphasize specially in reading material understanding as a cognitive skill as a part of a more ample whole: to speak, write, think, make, feel. It is of paramount importance the establishment by the students of relationships between the concepts given in a text-book and the knowledge acquired previously. Several authors interested on the problems related to the main idea understanding (Cunninghan y Moore, 1990; Vidal-Abarca, 1991; Alonso Tapia et al, 1992; Sanchez Miguel,1993) made a range of activities to recognize relevant information given in the text, and therefore the understanding of the main idea. The aim of this work is to detect the student’s failures in understanding a thermodynamic text. An exam was given to 97 freshmen at the Faculty of Dentistry of the National University of Tucuman (FOUNT). The examination consisted of a reading of a thermodynamics text, and to develop some activities: make a summary, put a title, extract the main idea, meke a graphic representation of what is suggested in the text and answer three questions related to concept given in the text. Also, they should indicate what was the most useful understanding strategy to them. Results were classified as: good, regular, and not-good. The results obtained showed that: 83,5% (1) did a satisfactory summary; 36,1% (35) succeeded in extracting the main idea; 40,2% (39) elaborated an appropriate title; 30,9% (30) were able to make a graphic representation in relation to the text; and 55,7% (55) answered correctly the questionnaire. Conclusions: a failure in understanding text was observed since only a few students were able to extract the main idea. This study show that a special support in understanding of texts should be implemented at the universitary in order to facilitate learning and to achieve a more acceptable academic performance.
Key words: understanding, thermodynamics test, main idea