Lydia R. Galagovsky; Marcela Greco
Description:
Structure-function relationships in Biology are difficult to be understood by secondary students. Even harder is theintroduction of concepts like emergent properties and organisation levels for living systems. In order to overcome theseobstacles, we designed an Analogical Didactical Model (ADM) to work with these concepts through a card game based on finding the structure-function relationships in a food factory. Through developing different tables, students could perform activities of ‘conceptual correlation’ between living beings such as humans, trees, unicellular organisms and ecosystems, and the factory analog. Then, students draw schemas to represent their mental models about biological systems. Every set of activities included meta-cognitive works that permitted students to become aware of those conceptsthat should incorporate or modify, as well as identify and overcome cognitive obstacles. The effectiveness of the proposal was evaluated by analysing the evolution in students’ productions regarding their misconceptions, the use of language and the conceptual achievements resulted of the application of an ADM.