Search

This research aimed to analyze an analogy used in the teaching of stoichiometry in Brazilian textbooks from a structural, semantic, and pragmatic perspective. The analogy being studied compares the fixed proportional relationships between ingredients in a cooking recipe to the relationships between reactants and products in chemical reactions. The analysis involved a review of the chapters in six textbooks that covered the topic of stoichiometry, an identification of the structure of the analogy, its characterization in structural, semantic, and pragmatic terms, and an evaluation of its presentation in the textbooks. The results showed that the analogy, present in three of the analyzed textbooks, has the potential to aid in the teaching of stoichiometry. This is because its structure focuses on the relationships between elements rather than simply describing them, and it is structurally consistent and has similarities in the contextual meanings between the mapped correspondences. The conclusion of the study suggests that although the authors of the analyzed textbooks have not fully explored all of the correspondences identified in the relational structure of the analogy, it offers a wealth of educational opportunities for teaching stoichiometry. This includes teaching concepts such as proportions between reactants and products, equation balancing, excess and limiting reactants, purity, and yield in chemical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]