Este trabalho investiga as Representações Sociais de alunos universitários de um termo que pela sua polissemia (orgânico) está ligado a conceitos científicos familiares a esse publico escolhido e ao mesmo tempo possui diversos significados possíveis. Desta forma utilizando como referencial metodológico a Teoria das Representações Sociais de Serge Moscovici investigamos as características das representações desse publico bem como conseguimos identificar os elementos constituintes do núcleo central da representação social desses estudantes observando suas semelhanças. A Psicologia Social através da Teoria das Representações Sociais sugere que tais representações são formas de conhecimentos socialmente construídos e que possuem também uma coerência e racionalidade assim como as outras formas de conhecimento, adquiridas na cultura escolar e que as novas aquisições intelectuais do sujeito são somadas às suas representações e não a substituem. Portanto haverá uma coexistência entre as representações de conceitos científicos com as de senso comum. Verificou-se através da análise dos dados obtidos em nosso estudo que a cultura escolar, portanto amplia o universo de representações do sujeito propiciando uma articulação entre os saberes cotidianos e os científicos.

The psychosocial approach assumes that social representations are socially built knowledge as coherent and rational as any other sort of information acquired in education at the school (Moscovici, 2003). In this context, the new concepts and propositions are incorporated into the cognitive structure, so the scientific and common sense representations coexist. This work is focused on Social Representations about the polissemic term "Organic". The meaning of this word is related to scientific concepts, familiar to undergraduate freshmen in science, and to many other senses associated to different contexts. The investigation was centered in three groups of freshman undergraduation students of São Paulo City, Brazil. We unveil the characteristics of the representations of these subjects under the constraints of the Serge Moscovici´s Social Representations Theory and we were able to identify the elements that build the central core of the referred representations. Our research tool consisted of two open questions: the first one of free style, meant to facilitate the remembering about the word, and in the second one the subject was asked to state four of his evocations hierarchically. The data analysis of the first question showed that "Organic" was not related to Chemistry for 60% of one of the investigated groups and 50% of the other two. In the second question, new representations emerged suggesting that there are several coexisting in the student's cognitive structure. The central core of social representation for the subjects is life and carbon for Pharmacy students and life, carbon and oil for the Chemistry group. Surprisingly, the representations are the same for both Pharmacy groups although their social economic and cultural levels are different, indicating a group consensus. However, this consensus is not the same observed for the Chemistry students. Our results suggest that the school culture enlarge one´s universe of representation, facilitating the scientific and diary knowledge articulation.