Secondary students’ conceptions about food safety in an argumentation context

Resumo

This paper examines the food safety conceptions of secondary education students in the context of an argumentation sequence. This proposal is part of a larger study on food safety that has been supported by two previous pilot studies. In this activity, students' previous conceptions of the concept of food safety are collected. After that, students work on a series of population profiles that represent different situations related to food safety, after a brief explanation of the different dimensions that this concept comprehends (availability, accessibility, consumption and biological use). Small groups of students are asked to examine and justify whether these people are in a food safety situation or not. The analysis examines the words that students use to refer to the concept of food safety, and also the type of justifications that are constructed to classify the different situations presented in the population profiles. The main results indicate that the majority of students associate the concept of food safety with hygiene and quality control processes on food. Most of the groups classified the population profiles successfully, although with different degrees of justification in their responses.