A reprovação e a evasão no ensino médio do Instituto Federal de Educação do Rio Grande do Norte: implicações da Pandemia da Covid-19 entre cotistas e não cotistas

Abstract

The general objective of this thesis was to analyze the implications of the covid-19 pandemic on the failure and dropout of quota and non-quota students from integrated technical high school courses at Instituto Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). The specific objectives consisted in identifying the level of failure and evasion of these students and investigating whether this failure and evasion reached similar levels among quota and non-quota students, as well as recognizing the demographic, institutional and socioeconomic factors related to these two phenomena. The importance of this research lies in the fact that the covid-19 pandemic negatively affected Brazilian basic education, especially with regard to performance and retention indicators. In the context of the demographic transition in the country, the consequences on the formation of human capital of these generations of students could have repercussions on the absorption of this workforce in the medium and long term. The comparison between quota students and non-quota students sought to highlight whether there were significant differences between these two groups, due to circumstances imposed by the covid19 pandemic in the educational context. Based on the administrative records of Sistema Unificado de Administração Pública (SUAP), made available by IFRN through approval by the institution's Ethics Committee, it was possible to monitor the academic trajectory of a cohort of 3,284 students from integrated technical courses on 20 campuses in Rio Grande do Norte, from the students' entry in 2019 until the end of the 2022 academic year. To achieve the proposed objectives, quantitative and qualitative methods were used. In the quantitative part of the study, a descriptive analysis of the students' educational and socioeconomic indicators was carried out, aggregated into 10 technological axes. As a strategy to identify the subjects of qualitative research belonging to the cohort of entrants in 2019 and who were still at the institution in the 2022 academic year, primary information was produced through the application of a quantitative questionnaire in five classes of integrated technical high school education. In this case, a set of 100 respondents from the Natal Central campus (CNat) were obtained on institutional, demographic and socioeconomic aspects related to the remote teaching period. Among the students of the identified cohort of interest, six of them consented to participate in the qualitative research, and semi-structured interviews were carried out with these subjects to understand in greater depth the institutional, demographic and socioeconomic factors related to school failure and dropout in the most critical years of the pandemic. Additionally, to obtain management's perception of remote teaching, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five pedagogues from the CNat campus. In general, from a quantitative point of view, the results showed that the level of failure of quota students was higher than that of non-quota students throughout the researched period, while the level of dropout between the two groups did not show significant disparities. From the point of view of qualitative analysis, it was evident that the difficulties of adapting to emergency remote teaching affected both groups of students, motivated mainly by the difficulty of concentrating in classes, and that the family conditions of quota students contributed to the intensification of this adversity. This study may provide support to ratify the need to maintain and implement public policies that enable equal opportunities in the educational sphere. Future studies may evaluate implications of covid-19 for specific technical courses, which was not possible to capture within the scope of this research.