O conhecimento biológico em livros didáticos de ciências dos anos iniciais: uma análise de parâmetros e indicadores de alfabetização científica

Abstract

Science teaching is responsible for promoting Scientific Literacy (SL), being important for the early years of Primary Education (EF), because it is the space of initiation of children to scientific knowledge, contributing to the formation and development of citizenship of students. According to national curriculum documents (National Curriculum Parameters – NCP and Common National Curriculum Base – CNCB), biological knowledge is part of the curriculum composition of the school subject Sciences for the early years of Elementary Education – knowledge from the various areas that make up the science of Biology, and should therefore be included in textbooks of the subject at this school level. These textbooks, according to the National Textbook Program (NTP), must follow the curricular guidelines in force in the area of Science Education and Biology Teaching, but it is observed that biologicalknowledge, at this level of education, is still little studied. This paper takes as research questions: does the way science textbooks for the early years (NTP/2019-2022) are organized in the structure and sequencing of the contents and activities related to biological knowledge enable students to develop SL parameters and indicators? How is biological knowledgepresent in the contents that involve it identified in science textbooks for the initial years, approved by the NTP (2019- 2022) and how do they relate to the SL process? Biological knowledge relates to actions, such as making observations, raising hypotheses and trying to prove them. The general objective of this research is to analyze how biological knowledge is present in early years science textbooks, through an analysis of parameters and indicators of SL and in what refers to biological knowledge. The specific objectives are: to characterize the biological knowledge present in science teaching in the early years in textbooks from 1st to5th grade and to characterize possible contributions of the biological knowledge present in theanalyzed textbooks for the Scientific Literacy process in the school context. Thus, a qualitative research was conducted to locate evidence of texts, schemes,problematizations/questions and images, in the context of biological knowledge in science textbooks - early years (NTP/2019-2022), to assist the teacher in the development of SL and biological knowledge of their students. It was chosen, for the analysis, a collection of Natural Sciences textbooks most voted and adopted in the Municipality of João Pessoa, Paraíba. The methodology is based on Bardin's Content Analysis, of the thematic type, which consists of one of the modalities of content analysis, with the construction of categories that lead us to theidentification of verbs and action terms within the analyzed didactic units and related to biological knowledge. The data analysis was based on the theoretical orientation provided by the three SL parameters described by Shen (1975), considering only the textual part of the books, some of the SL indicators proposed by Sasseron and Carvalho (2008). The analysis of the material initially identified and characterized how biological knowledge is present in thesecollections and how they define this knowledge.