INVESTIGATING CHARACTERISTICS OF AN EDUCATIONAL RELATIONAL APPROACH FOR THE TEACHING OF HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY
human body, physiological systems, educational design, relational teaching, validation, human physiology
This thesis starts from a critique of content, memoiristic and fragmented teaching, which is historically and traditionally practiced in the approach to human physiology contents in high school. This approach is restricted to knowledge of the components of systems and their functions, without establishing relationships between them or relating them to broader physiological processes. This poses a series of problems for students' understanding of the complexity of the human body. The general objective of this thesis is to investigate design principles of an educational intervention on human physiology to promote relational understanding of physiological processes by high school students. First, we present and discuss a bibliographical survey on the teaching of human physiology in Brazilian literature. Then, we build a conceptual framework for a relational approach to human physiology – CMF framework and argue about the criteria for this structuring and application form. Subsequently, we developed and validated an educational intervention with a relational approach to teach human physiology in high school and used the theoretical framework of Educational Design Research to elaborate three design principles for the intervention. In the third moment, we apply this intervention in the real context of the 3rd year classroom, addressing the contents of the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, to validate the design principles and analyze the results of this validation. To collect the data that make up this thesis, we use several data collection instruments, such as books and articles available on the Web, peer validation questionnaires, validation tests, and instruments to collect student learning data (knowledge tests and Resolution of QSC issues). The results give a series of indications that indicate that the design principles were validated based on the achievement of our teaching expectations for each one of them, such as the principle of didactic use of a QSC and relational approach to human physiology. The cooperative work principle has been reasonably validated and we make suggestions for improvement for application in future studies. We hope that this study will contribute to other research that intends to investigate characteristics of educational interventions in the field of Science teaching, and its results are parameters to generate insights about the use of QSC and the relational approach in the teaching of human physiology.