Abstract

DUARTE, José B.. Textbook: a fellow of the youngster in getting skills and curiosity for learning. Rev. Lusófona de Educação [online]. 2010, n.16, pp.119-130. ISSN 1645-7250.

This article starts with a confrontation between the recent curriculum guidelines on developing skills in problematic situations and the analysis of this problem by various authors. It follows that what is at stake for the current school and therefore also to the manuals, is to develop activities where students can do more than confine themselves to receive information about events, i.e., they are called to act and build their knowledge, at a more demanding point, the discovery or creativity. In short, the mobilization of prior knowledge, the confrontation with new applications of this knowledge and its reconstruction arises as a result of the challenge of problematic situations. It is recalled after the project of a team on analysis of textbooks in which it is realized that, in the textbooks examined, despite the goals set out on an approach to skills development, the proposed activities to students are limited in general to propositions of repetition of information contained in the preceding pages, to formulate relations between two previously described phenomena or concepts presented (in less simple cases) or to suggest experiments whose outcome is easily induced. In the end, the article exemplifies some activities with challenging issues of curiosity.

Keywords : epistemic curiosity; problematic situations; development of skills; motivations for learning.

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