As concepções sobre a estrutura e organização do universo de alunos de Ensino Médio

Abstract

Astronomy is one of the oldest objects of study, it has always been a source of curiosity when looking at the sky and trying to understand what is there. Even though it is an ancient science, its teaching is stagnant in time, and this is noticed in several works presented here, which the number of students who cannot correctly explain some points of the Solar System and even about the Universe is large. In this work developed with high school students, only 6% of students are aware of the existence of the asteroid belt in the Solar System, 36% placed the planets aligned, as if this system were flat. When it comes to putting in order a sequence of objects and elements of the Universe, 79.3% of the students got the correct sequence of organization, but when it comes to analyzing the proportions and comparing them with other elements, which are closer of our perception, the number of correct answers was 38.2%. In the final approach of the questionnaire applied here, regarding the representation of the universe, it is noticeable that most results place the Sun in some prominent position in the representation, which goes against the current understanding of how the universe is distributed.