Alfabetização científica em Botânica: o conhecimento prévio dos estudantes e a utilização do herbário evolutivo como estratégia de aprendizagem significativa

Abstract

The teaching of Botany has proved demotivating, based on the memorization of mechanical concepts and methodologies, making learning uninteresting and arbitrary. This intervention project has the purpose of contributing to a significant learning about the evolution of plants. The work was developed with 1st grade students of a State School, located in São Gonçalo do Para, Minas Gerais. A pre-test was applied where we obtained data from the students' previous knowledge on the subject. Then, the students were proposed the construction of a herbarium containing copies of the 4 groups of plants. Finally, a post-test was applied. The results obtained in the pre-test and in the post-test showed that the herbarium was efficient for the understanding of the evolutionary characteristics of the Plant Kingdom, besides having provided the contextualization between the learning and the daily flora of the students, thus providing a potentially significant learning.