The topic of scientific and technological development impact in human life in 8th grade Natural Sciences textbooks. What traits of the STS approach?

• Autor(a) principal: da Silva, José Luís Coelho
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/id.v8i1.4677

The Scientific and Technological Impact in Human Life is a topic in which, the majority of Portuguese 8th grade Natural Science school textbooks contains proposed learning activities. This didactical element is the focus of the present study because it creates the opportunity for students to develop their knowledge, competencies and attitudes, enabling them to become an active citizen in society. In this regard, and since the nature of this topic encourages STS approaches, it is important to understand the educational role of the learning activities, using the STS perspective as a reference. Achieving this goal required the mobilization of qualitative and quantitative procedures oriented towards: 1) listing and analysing the tasks in the proposed learning activities, to characterize the potential roles undertaken by the students; 2) identifying explored themes in order to determine the scientific approach and the local, regional or global range that characterize them, and 3) identifying the STS emphasis in the exploration of those themes. The learning activities exhibit features of STS orientation with different degrees of incidence: socio-scientific nature and global range arecharacteristic of the addressed themes; the impact of technology on society is the main focus on the exploration of the themes; and, the promotion of social intervention ability is limited to a small number of tasks. The analysis shows the importance of promoting learning environments oriented towards developing decision-making skills, participation and the assumption of responsible actions.