Resumo

MANO, Amanda de Mattos Pereira  e  SARAVALI, Eliane Giachetto. Origin of life in the students’ perspective. Relations between social knowledge and cognitive development. Educ. Puc. [online]. 2018, vol.23, n.1, pp.79-94. ISSN 2318-0870.  https://doi.org/10.24220/2318-0870v23n1a3663.

Based on Piaget’s theory, this article presents partial data obtained in a study that investigated the relationship between the construction of social knowledge and cognitive development. The social notion explored here was “the origin of life”, as worked in Science classes of the elementary school II. We resorted to clinical interviews to evaluate the ideas participants have about this matter, as well as to the floating bodies operative test, with the intention of observing subjects’ cognitive development. The study included students enrolled in public schools in a city of São Paulo, 60 of them between 10 and 16 years-old and 15 subjects in each of the following age groups: 10, 12, 14 and 16. Results indicated progress in social knowledge construction concerning the origin of life as the ages advance, but still, most students have fairly rudimentary interpretations of this social notion. It was also observed that few participants achieved the level of formal operations on the evaluated test. Quantitative analysis showed a highly significant relationship between the construction of social knowledge and cognitive development. The article also discusses the pedagogical implications, above all, of the need for methodological proposals that respect knowledge construction processes.

Palavras-chave : Social knowledge; Cognitive development; Science education; Piaget’s theory.

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