Social representations of basic education students about black holes

Abstract

This work presents the results of an analysis of mind maps, whose objective was to investigate the social representations shared by students of the ninth grade of elementary school on the theme Black Hole, during the implementation of a Potentially Meaningful Teaching Unit- PMTU. Understanding these representations can assist in the process of learning the concepts of Black Hole, Relativity and Universal Gravitation, adding common sense ideas to the scientific concepts studied at PMTU. The results indicate that the students surveyed have social representations of the theme, which are based on elements from the formal education space and also disseminated in the media. In addition, they demonstrate that they have knowledge about Astronomy, verified by the diversity of representations, evidenced in the elaborated mental maps, which mix elements of common sense with elements of scientific knowledge. The analysis of the data also revealed that most of the words evoked in the research presented possible social representations inserted in the reified universe.