On researches related to the teaching of the photoelectric effect

Abstract

The number of researches and different aspects involved in teaching topics of Modern and Contemporary Physics (MCF) in high school have grown quite considerably in recent years, often requiring the survey and categorization of published works. In this sense, our work aims to present the results of a literature review related exclusively to the teaching of the photoelectric effect, preferably in high school, from national and international journals in the area of Teaching and Education. We have taken the work of Ostermann and Moreira (2000) as a starting point and followed it until the end of 2014. According to our selection criteria, we have identified 41 articles and classified them into eight categories, namely: (A) Theoretical and conceptual basis of the photoelectric effect; (B) Description of analogies and situations of contextualization of the photoelectric effect; (C) HFC aspects regarding the photoelectric effect; (D) Proposals or teaching reports of the photoelectric effect mediated by computer simulation; (E) Proposals or teaching reports of the photoelectric effect mediated by HFC; (F) proposals or teaching reports of the photoelectric effect mediated by experimentation and (G) Analysis of textbooks or manual regarding the photoelectric effect approach. The results indicate that most published studies report proposals to be used in the classroom by using computer simulation, experimentation or aspects of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), however, few researchers have effectively investigated the construction process of the physical concepts present in the corpuscular model of light.