A utilização de cladogramas para o ensino de sistemática filogenética no ensino médio

Abstract

In Teaching Biology, the content of Biological Evolution has constantly been the subject of discussion in various teaching spaces, both for what it represents and for the difficulty of addressing it in the classroom. For a number of reasons, it is necessary to elucidate such a significant and key content for the advancement and understanding of the concept of life. In addition, it is currently known that Evolution should be the central axis of Biology in all contents and approaches, in order to understand the diversity of beings and among beings of a species. In this work, we tried to introduce and explain Evolution to students in an intentional way, through activities using cladograms to teach Phylogenetic Systematics, which provided an understanding of the evolutionary process of living beings. We chose to use cladograms because these diagrams show the relationships of ancestry and phylogenetic diversity among beings. The work is characterized as an exploratory and applied, interpretative research with a qualitative approach. It contains a correlation between the characteristics of Classical Taxonomy and Phylogenetic Systematics, an explanation about cladograms, a survey in the Official Documents about the importance of Evolution being the axis in the Teaching of Biology, and the development of activities with the use of cladograms. The research was developed with a third grade class of high school students from a public high school in the interior of Paraná. The application consisted of five activities: a survey of the students' previous knowledge, activities with the use of cladograms, a dialogical exposition of the content Biological Evolution through Phylogenetic Systematics with the use of cladograms, activities with interpretation and construction of cladograms by the students. The results obtained showed that the students had a superficial and mistaken knowledge about the subject, confused Evolution with improvement, enhancement, adaptations directed by the environment, and few knew the cladograms. During the application of the activities, through their comments and the aptitude they demonstrated during the final activity, the progress and the capacity developed by them could be seen, demonstrating the progress in relation to the content and the effectiveness and relevance of the approach used.