Meaningful learning in Adult Education: an analysis of conceptual evolution from an didactic intervention with the energy theme

Abstract

The use of thematic approaches is an important strategy to give greater meaning to the teaching of science in adult education. Consider the contextual specificities is critical to ensure the pre-disposition of the student want to learn certain concepts. In the present study, prior to the development of a potentially significant didactic intervention, the research -interests of the students, their realities and also the lifting of pre-conceptions related to the concept of energy was performed. From the data obtained in this study, presented in detail in a dissertation, this article proposes to discuss the importance of cross-cutting theme Energy and brings the benchmarks of learning theories to justify conceptual evolution obtained by students at the end of the development of an educational module. The development of the intervention was conducted with two groups of Adult Education (EJA), where the teacher-researcher acted from an interdisciplinary attitude to knowledge, bringing a broad vision for the theme. The evidence of meaningful learning were obtained from the comparative analysis of previous data classes with the answers at the end of the intervention, collected from a final questionnaire research. Data were categorized and analyzed from the Textual Discourse Analysis (Moraes and Galiazzi, 2007). This study showed that the activities provided a conceptual evolution from different methodological strategies used and there was a decrease in the conceptual fragmentation energy theme by students. At the end of the lessons, students associated energy for transformation processes and also the principle of conservation (Categories Transformation and Flow) and listed examples of its forms (Source Category). Are also highlighted the importance of self-assessment by the students and the implications of this research for the area.