Teachers of science in the final years of elementary school face challenges that
increasingly require an innovative approach to ensure meaningful learning for
students. Among some contemporary psych pedagogical suggestions, the
development of students' metacognitive skills is one of the recommended ways
to enhance the teaching and learning process, enriching conceptual
understanding, and fostering intellectual, emotional, and social skills. This work
aims to make a contribution to the aforementioned field of research, analyzing
the impacts of using metacognitive teaching strategies on learning concepts and
skills of the knowledge object Life and Evolution in classes of students in the 7th
year of Elementary School, titled “Metacognitive strategies for classes on
microorganisms”. To achieve this, a didactic guide for teachers was created,
describing a set of teaching and learning activities on the topic of Life and
Evolution. Due to the nature of the process to be investigated, a qualitative
approach was chosen to collect and analyze data, examining the behavior and
attitudes of students when engaging in metacognitive educational activities
proposed in the didactic product. The didactic product, resulting from this
research, was specifically designed for application in regular classes of the final
years of elementary school, aiming to improve the learning of knowledge and
skills in the Science curriculum, specifically tailored for 7th-grade students.
Evidence was presented supporting the use of metacognitive teaching strategies,
suggesting that this approach can provide motivation and enthusiasm, even in
shy or inattentive students, enhancing the overall learning of scientific content in
the class. Activities that allow individual reflection, peer-to-peer reflection, and
interaction with teachers seem to enable the acquisition and use of metacognitive
skills and conceptual enrichment on the subject. There is evidence that the
implemented activities had a positive learning effect in various aspects analyzed:
maintaining interest in classes, providing opportunities for students to express
their doubts, challenging them to solve contextualized problems, exposing them
to historical information about the development of scientific knowledge, and
prompting them to reflect and make inferences about typical aspects of scientific
discoveries. These are aspects that are often not addressed in elementary school
science classes.
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