Dissertation Defense
Student: Gabriel Moreira Barros
Program: Mestrado Profissional em Ensino de Astronomia
Title: “ASTRONOMY AND STELLAR EVOLUTION: A DIDACTIC PROPOSAL FOR TEACHING STAR COLOR AND TEMPERATURE”
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Roberto Dell'Aglio Dias da Costa
Judging Committee
Chair: Prof. Dr. Roberto Dell'Aglio Dias da Costa - IAG/USP
- Profa. Dra. Elysandra Figueredo Cypriano - IAG/USP
- Profa. Dra. Lúcia Helena Sasseron Roberto – FE - USP
- Profa. Dra. Tassiana Fernanda Genzini de Carvalho - UFPE– por videoconferência
Abstract
The content typically associated with Astronomy has been present since the National Curriculum Guidelines and, currently, in the National Common Curriculum Base, indicating that Astronomy education is included in the curricular guidelines and part of student training. Therefore, Astronomy education needs to align with curricula and their assumptions of holistic and global student development and connect with the references of Science Education, which aim to form individuals who reflect on and intervene in their reality. To achieve this, Astronomy education should go beyond teaching concepts and content, enabling the development of epistemic and social elements, and the practice of science itself, alongside students. In light of the presented context, this work developed and implemented a didactic sequence using the Three Pedagogical Moments (Delizoicov et al., 2002) as a methodological tool to structure the activities, and Inquiry-Based Teaching as a theoretical reference for interacting with students, to address the topic of star color and temperature. Six activities were created for application with students; however, due to practical issues, the structure of the sequence underwent modifications, as some activities required specific conditions for implementation, involving experiments that depended on sunlight, leading to a structural reorganization of the sequence, with 2 activities remaining as supplementary. The evaluation of the sequence application is based on a qualitative methodological approach, characterized by a case study, with pre-defined analysis categories. The conceptual, epistemic, and social domains proposed by Duschl (2003, 2008) contribute to the evaluation of the sequence and highlight formative elements beyond the conceptual. The analysis of the activities indicates that students were exposed to typical science practices, such as argumentation, problem-solving, hypothesis generation, data comparison, and estimation, among others, demonstrating the potential of Astronomy to provide learning situations that integrate curricula and theoretical assumptions of Science Education.
Keywords: Astronomy Education, Inquiry- Based Teaching, Three Pedagogical Moments, Star Color and Temperature.