What is alcoholic fermentation? A study about the alcoholic fermentation conception through the history

This work shows the historical development of the alcoholic fermentation conception, based on expe-rimental results obtained from European scientists, from Renascence to the beginning of 20th century(1930). From this, ve concepts were identied for the phenomenon: putrefactive, spiritual, chemical,biological and biochemical. The current conception of alcoholic fermentation was also evaluated. Forthis proposal, three groups of teachers were interviewed through the question? What is alcoholicfermentation? The P group (pilot, n=12) made of professionals that teach on secondary and highschools, group A composed of PhDs from the Center of Technology Education - NUTES (n=9) andgroup B from Department of Medical Biochemistry (called group B, n=41) both of Federal Universityof Rio de Janeiro, respectively. Key words associated with the fermentative process were identiedidentify in the interviewees answers. The group A components mentioned only six key words andpointed out the alcoholic fermentation products. Dierently, subjects from P and B groups cited ahigher number and also more unusual key words (n = 9 and 12, respectively). We also analyzedtheir answers throughout fermentative descriptive words (sugar, alcohol, carbon dioxide, anaerobic,yeast and ATP). These words were established after an evaluation of alcoholic fermentation conceptstated in the Biology/Biochemistry books most adopted in high schools and Universities. Our analysisshowed that group A used only three descriptive words (sugar, alcohol and yeast) while componentsof group B used all the selected descriptive words. However, only one interviewee used all the sixwords together. From this analysis, we proposed that the chemical concept of alcoholic fermentationprevailed on the other concepts found on the historical research (spiritual, putrefactive, biological ebiochemical).