Livro didático: uma análise crítica no conteúdo de biologia molecular contido em livros de biologia utilizados no ensino médio da rede pública de Minas Gerais

Abstract

One of the major challenges for biology teachers in the 21st century has been addressing the content of molecular biology in high school. This is a content that has evolved considerably in recent decades since the advent of the Genome Project, but whose simplification to the textbook approach has led to gross and inappropriate misconceptions, making it difficult for students to understand and acquire the correct concepts. Seeking to remedy this problem, in the present work, we proposed to perform a critical analysis of the content of Molecular Biology in the textbooks most adopted by Biology teachers in high school in public schools. For this, the first stage of development of this work was to conduct a survey with PNLD (MEC) of the most adopted biology textbooks in the public network. Based on the result of this stage, the five most adopted books in the public schools of Minas Gerais were selected, which were referred to throughout this work as Books 1 to 5. The analysis of Book 1, adopted by 24% of Minas Gerais public elementary schools, revealed that this book was the one with the highest number of errors or misconceptions, 19 in total. In the analysis of Book 2, adopted by 20% of Minas Gerais public elementary schools, 12 errors were found. In the analysis of Book 3, adopted by 14% of Minas Gerais public elementary schools, 11 errors or inaccuracies were found. In the analysis of book 4, adopted in 13% of Minas Gerais public elementary schools, two serious concept errors and three concept inaccuracies were found. And in the analysis of book 5, adopted in 12% of public elementary schools in Minas Gerais, nine errors or inaccuracies were found. Analysis of the content of Molecular Biology in four editions of Book 5 revealed that there was a reduction in the number of errors detected over the years 2005-2016, demonstrating a growing concern to correct the main errors. To verify the ability of students and teachers to detect errors contained in the content of Molecular Biology, a structured questionnaire was applied to different agents of basic and higher education, with statements extracted from part of the books analyzed. Thus, we could see that, since most of the detected errors are already well established in the school community, even their identification by biology teachers constituted a difficulty. In order to compare the ability to perceive errors, a similar questionnaire was applied to undergraduate students in Biological Sciences at UFMG. In order to observe the performance of playful and practical activities as efficient strategies in the study of Molecular Biology in High School, similar questionnaires were applied to these agents, before and after the activities. Thus, we could see how important it is to perform activities such as these, as the result revealed that students improved their knowledge about the content of Molecular Biology. As an innovative product of this work, an illustrated booklet was prepared, containing the main errors detected in the three books and their corrections so that it can serve as complementary and supportive teaching material in the teaching of Molecular Biology for high school.