Teaching Parasitology with Concept Maps in Laboratory Lessons for Teacher Education Courses

Conceição Aparecida Soares Mendonça^1, and Felipa Pacífico Ribeiro de Assis Silveira²

¹Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco – Unidade Acadêmica de Garanhuns. Garanhuns, Brazil

²UNIMESP, Centro Universitário Metropolitano de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Cite this paper:
Conceição Aparecida Soares Mendonça and Felipa Pacífico Ribeiro de Assis Silveira. Teaching Parasitology with Concept Maps in Laboratory Lessons for Teacher Education Courses. American Journal of Educational Research. 2016; 4(3):254-263. doi: 10.12691/education-4-3-5

Abstract

This paper presents a teaching strategy developed for lab lessons in a course of Human Parasitology, within the Biological Sciences Teaching Education Course, at the Faculdade de Formação de Professores, Universidade de Pernambuco, FFPG – UPE, located in Garanhuns, Brazil. The proposed strategy was supported by Concept Maps. These are tools whose theoretical foundations lie in Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory. The course was taken by a group of 6^th semester undergraduate students that were studying to be middle and high-school biological sciences teachers. We have observed that Concept Mapping has favoured the interaction between students, and thus made the lessons about Human Parasitology more interesting. Moreover, the produced Concept Maps showed evidence of progressive differentiation and integrative reconciliation of the proposed concepts. Thus, we argue that Concept Maps are relevant resources for teaching parasitology in lab lessons, enriching the teaching strategies, and thus making them potentially more meaningful for course development in a Teacher Education Course.

Keywords:
parasitology teaching-learning teacher training biological sciences

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