Indicators of Scientific Literacy in Geographic Education and Geographical Reasoning: a case study in periphery of São Paulo, Brazil
Márcia RISETTE, São Paulo University, Brazil
This study presents indicators of Scientific Literacy in Geography (Risette, 2021), and the process of designing them from the results yielded in activities developed with senior middle school students, young people aged 11-15, from a public school in São Paulo, Brasil. Those activities offered reflection possibilities about teaching and learning processes in Geographic Education and also about how the assessment of teachers can enhance students comprehension of spatial concepts and the procedures of building geographical reasoning. The development of indicators required the theoretical integration of four knowledge fields, such as spatial thinking (Gersmehl, 2008), school cartography (Castellar, 2017), scientific literacy (Moraes, 2016), and geographical concepts and principles (Gomes, 2017), which already exist in classical geography. The relevance of indicators lies in their potential to contribute both to the development of teaching strategies and to the assessment of learning. They offer criteria to understand how the hypotheses are like and the way that students reason geographically, when applying geographic concepts, categories and principles in geographic situations. The contents developed in the classroom, relating representations, spatial concepts, categories and principles of geography considered in the analysis method, were fundamental for the construction of the indicators. All activities involved the students living place, associated with urbanization processes, demographic increases, landscape changes, urban pattern, mental maps, and cartographic sketches. The results were established from students answers. In this way, they enable teachers to assess students performance, validating the importance of assigning indicators in the teaching and learning process. The conclusion considers the importance of indicators when articulating the aforementioned four fields of knowledge with focus on the development of geographic reasoning.
Mots clés : Indicators of Scientific Literacy in Geographic Education|Geographical Reasoning|Spatial Thinking|Scientific Literacy|Didactic Sequence
A105288MR