Abordando microrganismos com estratégias de ensino de natureza metacognitiva

Abstract

Teachers of science in the final years of elementary school face challenges that increasingly require an innovative approach to ensure meaningful learning for students. Among some contemporary psych pedagogical suggestions, the development of students' metacognitive skills is one of the recommended ways to enhance the teaching and learning process, enriching conceptual understanding, and fostering intellectual, emotional, and social skills. This work aims to make a contribution to the aforementioned field of research, analyzing the impacts of using metacognitive teaching strategies on learning concepts and skills of the knowledge object Life and Evolution in classes of students in the 7th year of Elementary School, titled “Metacognitive strategies for classes on microorganisms”. To achieve this, a didactic guide for teachers was created, describing a set of teaching and learning activities on the topic of Life and Evolution. Due to the nature of the process to be investigated, a qualitative approach was chosen to collect and analyze data, examining the behavior and attitudes of students when engaging in metacognitive educational activities proposed in the didactic product. The didactic product, resulting from this research, was specifically designed for application in regular classes of the final years of elementary school, aiming to improve the learning of knowledge and skills in the Science curriculum, specifically tailored for 7th-grade students. Evidence was presented supporting the use of metacognitive teaching strategies, suggesting that this approach can provide motivation and enthusiasm, even in shy or inattentive students, enhancing the overall learning of scientific content in the class. Activities that allow individual reflection, peer-to-peer reflection, and interaction with teachers seem to enable the acquisition and use of metacognitive skills and conceptual enrichment on the subject. There is evidence that the implemented activities had a positive learning effect in various aspects analyzed: maintaining interest in classes, providing opportunities for students to express their doubts, challenging them to solve contextualized problems, exposing them to historical information about the development of scientific knowledge, and prompting them to reflect and make inferences about typical aspects of scientific discoveries. These are aspects that are often not addressed in elementary school science classes.