Higher education students perception of the importance of exsiccata for plant taxonomic identification

• Autor(a) principal: Tourinho dos Santos, Igor
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: da Silva Patrício, Alexander, Cavalcante de Oliveira, Carlos, de Lima Ramos, Margred, Abreu Lima, Renato
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por; eng
• Título da fonte: Diversitas Journal
• Texto Completo: https://diversitasjournal.com.br/diversitas_journal/article/view/2461
• topic: Ensino de Botânica; Taxonomia; Amazonas; Botânica; Teaching of Botany; Taxonomy; Amazonas

The teaching of Botany, in turn, takes place in a disjointed way and without contextualization, in an approach that makes it difficult to properly learn its concepts. With this, the present work aimed to recognize the importance of botanical collections in the teaching of plant taxonomy for undergraduate students in Science: Biology and Chemistry at the Federal University of Amazonas - UFAM. The research was carried out at the Instituto de Natureza e Cultura–INC/UFAM in the municipality of Benjamin Constant - AM, and a questionnaire was prepared and applied to 20 students from the 6th period addressing popular knowledge with scientific knowledge and the importance of identifying plant species. Through the results obtained, it was found that the questionnaires had a positive return on the students' knowledge about the techniques of exsiccata, since all the students knew how to answer the concept and the necessary scientific methodological procedures. However, only 75% of students are aware of the storage of exsiccates present in the educational institution, showing that there are still students who are unaware of this extremely important scope in the specific area of ​​Botany. It is worth mentioning that the students mentioned that the exsiccata or plant samples are of great importance, since this serves as an identification of plants or species and from the exsiccata it is possible to carry out scientific work or even compare them with other plant species. Therefore, this research is of fundamental importance for a better understanding of the exsiccata and botanical identification in the current context that the university finds itself, in the triple border Brazil x Peru x Colombia, rethinking the way of approaching the botany content, so that the student is interested for the same and does not perpetuate the “botanical blindness”, enabling the perception of the importance of plants in their daily lives.