Perspectivas das práticas investigativas para a promoção da alfabetização científica no ensino fundamental

Abstract

In science teaching, students' lack of interest and motivation in building their knowledge atschool may be associated with the difficulty in relating curricular scientific concepts to thesituations they experience in their daily lives. This raises the great challenge of bringingscientific knowledge closer to the students' context, making learning meaningful. With a viewto teaching that promotes Scientific Literacy (SL), Teaching Science by Investigation (TSI) isshown to be an approach capable of stimulating students' interest and active participation inthe teaching-learning process. In addition to the ability to read and write, SL equips students tounderstand and apply scientific knowledge in everyday life. In this research, we sought toidentify the contributions of TSI and Meaningful Learning (ML) to promoting SL in 8th gradestudents, highlighting the importance of valuing students' prior knowledge in order to enablelong-lasting learning that is applicable in a variety of situations. To do this, we used anInvestigative Teaching Sequence (ITS) with the theme “Reproductive Mechanisms” as a tool forinducing scientific culture, which goes beyond the way this theme is usually dealt with: in anexpository way and based on the textbook, avoiding dialogues and debates. In themethodological process, data was collected through an ITS aligned with the CurriculumDocument for Goiás (DC-GO) - built according to the assumptions of Carvalho (2013) andevaluated using the Diagnosis of Elements of Science Teaching by Investigation (DESTI) toolproposed by Cardoso and Scarpa (2018). 144 students were impacted by a didactic approachthat aimed to bring curricular scientific concepts closer to the students' innate curiosity aboutthe object of knowledge “Reproduction”, provoking greater engagement and enchantmentwith “doing science”. As a social impact, we have helped teachers of natural sciences with theirdifficulties in working on the subject of “Reproduction”; at the same time, we have enabledstudents to become more SL and opened up possibilities for students to get to knowthemselves better, being able to respect their own needs and those of others, as well asmaking assertive choices involving historically constructed scientific knowledge, acharacteristic of scientifically literate individuals.