Entrelaçando representações sociais e saberes científicos sobre meteoritos para uma aprendizagem significativa no ensino médio

Abstract

Meteors are solid natural fragments of interplanetary space that reach the Earth's surface. When studied, they contribute to the understanding about the formation of the Solar System. Many meteorites may be close to us, but due to lack of information, they can be confused with terrestrial rocks, so Brazil has few catalogued specimens. In school, for meteorites to become something significant, it is necessary to value the previous knowledge of the students. Thus, a quali-quantitative research was developed, having as main objective: to enable significant learning from the resignification of the social representations of the meteorites in the students of a high school class through a Didactic Sequence. We used as main theoretical and methodological bases, the Meaningful Learning Theory of Ausubel, the Social Representations Theory of Moscovici, the Central Core of Social Representations Theory of Abric and the work on meteorites of Maria Zucolotto and Wilton Carvalho. A theoretical research, analysis of the books of Geography and Physics used in the school and a pre-test with objective and subjective questions were carried out with 30 students of the second year of high school, of the State College D. Prof. Rômulo Galvão, in Elísio Medrado-BA. Theoretical research revealed a scarcity of pedagogical work on meteorites in formal education and the books used did not even contain the term "meteorite". The pre-test revealed the inexistence of subsumers, as well as the presence of social representations of meteorites that distance them from their scientific concept and bring them closer to the concepts of asteroids, meteoroids and meteoroids, and has in the concept of stone (rock) the Central Core of these representations. The pre-test offered subsidies for the planning and execution of a Didactic Sequence (SD) containing seven modules, favoring the insertion of subsumers through previous organizers and the development of significant learning in its types (conceptual, representative and propositional) and forms (subordinate, superordinate and combinatorial). At the end of the SD application, the post-test was carried out with objective and subjective questions similar to the pre-test, where it was verified quantitatively that 57% of the students reached more than 50% of hits, being this a very satisfactory rate if compared to the pre-test with only 3% of students hitting more than 50% of the questions. It was perceptible qualitatively in the students, the resignification of social representations on meteorites and the assimilation of new concepts when demonstrating in the post-test the integrative reconciliation and progressive differentiation when answering some questions. We consider, therefore, that the study of meteorites favors the increase of interest in Astronomy, and may be more present in the school curriculum and textbooks, and that the use of the Theory of Social Representations and the Central Core of Representations make significant learning in Astronomy more effective. As products of this research we have: Teaching sequence entitled Meteorites and the Meteorite Almanac, which can be used as teaching resources in Astronomy teaching activities.