Experimentos em ecologia para incrementar a eficácia do ensino em áreas rurais no Nordeste do Brasil

Abstract

To teach ecology in high school is a challenge to leave pure conceptual approaches to move towards the current real life of students. Teaching difficulties end up promoting simplistic learning of this content with deep connection to students’ interests. Moreover, the understanding of the ecological systems dynamics in an integrated way may generate conceptual confusion and misconceptions. This research proposal aims to test the effectiveness of the use of practical experiments under an interactionist approach to the learning of population ecology by high school students. For this, we propose the use of ecological experiments to increase the appropriation of knowledge of high school students in a rural school context. The school is in an agricultural region where we built and applied two experiments using basic concepts on population ecology. The demonstrative experiments were applied to crops testing the viability of these populations. Students were randomly assigned to develop the educational sequence activities and divided into individual, double, and triplet groups to examine the influence of social interactions on the formation of cognitive structures. Students underwent pre and post-tests for quantitative and qualitative assessment. Statistical analysis showed that the results were significant at P< 0.05. Tukey test showed that students who worked in groups achieved better results than those who performed the same tasks individually, supporting the Vygotsky constructivist approach. A scientometric analysis was also performed on articles dealing with instructional methodological to teach ecology. The results confirm that pedagogical theories are not explicit in most of the analyzed publications. Results allowed to make a series of reflections on the limited actual use of pedagogy to construct instructional models in the area of ecology.