7 out of 10 students graduating in exact sciences drop out – 05/31/2023 – Education

The country’s challenge to train teachers to meet the needs of the Brazilian educational system is more serious in the area of ​​exact sciences, where student learning accumulates greater challenges. Teacher education courses in mathematics, chemistry and physics have dropout rates of around 70%, well above the general average for the university system.

About 7 out of 10 new entrants in 2012 in degrees in these areas had already abandoned the course in 2021, according to data tabulated by Inep (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research). On the other hand, completion rates are the lowest in these three courses: it is 24% in physics and 30% in mathematics and chemistry.

These data point to a series of challenges for Brazilian education, in which causes and consequences are mixed, according to statistics, studies and specialists. This scenario involves the predominance of distance graduations —allied with an unattractive structure of courses—, accumulation of difficulties brought about by an inefficient basic education, in addition to low attractiveness for the teaching career.

Mathematics, for example, is the area with the worst results in large-scale assessments. Brazil can only guarantee that 5% of students finish high school in public schools with adequate learning in mathematics.

Of the approximately 2 million young people who complete this stage of education, more than 1.9 million leave school without being able, for example, to solve percentage problems or use the Pythagorean Theorem.

Research has already shown that teaching degrees attract basic education students with lower performance in basic education. When it comes to courses with high loads of specific school knowledge, such as mathematics, the difficulties of basic education reverberate in higher education.

“There is not just one factor that explains the situation. There is, at first, a reflection of basic education itself, of the failure in learning mathematics. And mathematics has basic knowledge to learn chemistry and mainly physics. collaborates with the dropout”, says the director of the Reúna institute, Katia Smole, specialist in teacher training in Mathematics.

Former Secretary of Basic Education at MEC (Ministry of Education), Smole claims that there is a ripple effect. “Those who enter teaching degrees still find ingrained models from the beginning of the 20th century, distanced from school, there is no course focused on what we call pedagogical content knowledge. With the prevalence of distance learning, the disaster is generalized”, he completes she, who also emphasizes the low attractiveness of the career as a reason for students leaving.

Of the 1.6 million enrollments in undergraduate courses in the country, 64.4% are in private institutions. Seven out of ten are women.

Many teaching networks are already suffering from a shortage of teachers and there are already estimates of a possible shortage of teachers in the coming years. A study by Semesp, an entity from São Paulo that represents private colleges, calculates that by 2040 the country will have a deficit of 240,000 professors.

The research points to the impact on the drop in the number of graduates in these courses. This phase of the survey did not delve into the areas, but the available data indicate that the biggest bottlenecks are in specific training, such as exact sciences.

The number of new entrants to teacher training courses has been falling since 2020, and 77% of new students in 2021 enrolled in distance education. The inadequacy of remote teaching for teacher training is practically a consensus among those who work on the subject, whether scholars or politicians.

Semesp’s executive director, Rodrigo Capelato, says that the demand for face-to-face teaching courses is very low. The advancement of distance education occurs a lot because professionals who already work in education, and who are older, seek a second graduation —either to adapt to the positions they occupy or to progress in their careers based on the increase in training.

Capelato explains that of the 266,000 graduates who took the Enade, the federal assessment, in 2021, the majority (155,000) were non-attendance students — and 58% of students responded that they were already in the teaching profession.

“There is a very worrying picture of young people who do not want to do a degree. In addition to verifying that the freshmen [do EAD] are the oldest, they are already teaching”, says Capelato.

Of the 1.6 million enrollments in teacher training courses in 2021, almost half are in the pedagogy course. Next come physical education (with 122 thousand enrollments, corresponding to 7.4% of the total) and mathematics (98 thousand students, 6%).

Chemistry accounts for 2.3% of those enrolled (37,000 enrollments) and Physics, for 1.8% (30,000 students). Thus, the high dropout rates in these courses fall on an already small number of students. The data refer to the whole country, in public and private higher education networks.

Among teacher training courses, the best performance in the trajectory of students is in pedagogy. The cumulative dropout rate is 50%, below the average for all courses in Brazil, which is also high at 59%.

Today in high school, 45% of the teachers who teach physics do not have training in the area or do not even have training. This index is 31% in the case of chemistry and 19% in mathematics.

Under the Lula (PT) government, the MEC created a working group in March to propose policies to improve initial teacher training. The work ended on Tuesday (30) and the folder has one month to present a report with proposals.

Asked by Sheet Regarding the situation, the MEC highlighted in a note the work of the group and also the expansion of the teaching initiation scholarship program, the so-called Pibid, which increased from 57,000 scholarships to 90,000, in addition to the increase in the value of benefits. The program is expected to reach 100,000 scholarships in 2024.