EXPECTATIONS OF STUDENTS ABOUT ASTRONOMY IN HIGH SCHOOL

Abstract

Current literature reports that the astronomy education is motivating and interesting for basic education, but the content suggested by the national curriculum guidelines do not seem to attract students and teachers in order to transcend the discipline of Science in the elementary School or Physics in High School. By applying a questionnaire to 80 students of High School and participants of Brazilian Olympiad of Astronomy and Astronautics of two schools of São Paulo state, we obtained results that indicate that astronomy topics that really motivate students are topics linked to science fiction and current research, which are the subject of extensive media release and have a strong interdisciplinary character. At the end of the work we suggest a new context for astronomy education, by inserting topics combined with other areas of knowledge to what we call “interdisciplinary astrophysics teaching”.