The science vision of high school female students who participated in a university extension program

The Engineer of the Future (ENGFUT) extension program, supported by the University of Caxias do Sul (UCS), has been promoting, for over a decade, the interaction of high school students and teachers with careers related to Exact Sciences and Engineering. Through activities carried out at the institution, under the supervision of faculty members and scholarship students. As part of ENGFUT, the Encouraging Girls in Science and Technology (EMC&T) project, dedicated to high school female students, aims to encourage them to consider professional careers in scientific and technological fields. In this context, this work reports an assessment carried out regarding the views on the Nature of Science of EMC&T participants, in order to improve the activities and workshops offered and, thus, enable the construction of a vision of Science as a result of a dynamic, social and historical process. To carry out this evaluation, the Discourse Analysis was used to analyze the answers to an open questionnaire applied to the 37 project participants. The analysis showed that participants who have a greater understanding of the Nature of Science come from private schools and public schools located in small towns in the region. The results of the analysis indicated that the conception of Science of the majority of the students who participated in the EMC&T is consistent with aspects of the Nature of Science present in the literature, among which, that Science is not definitive and universally agreed, with disagreement and the refutation of hypotheses, and that the development of Science also results from the social and cultural influence in which it is immersed.