Competence of high school students to apply ideas about the functioning of ecosystems

Abstract

• We analyze the competence of tenth-grade students (specialty in Science and Arts) and ninth-grade students with generalized learning difficulties when applying ideas related to the functioning of ecosystems and the patterns of causal thinking that they activate in their explanations. An open-ended questionnaire was used to collect data. The results show that most students had difficulties to apply ideas such as the role of decomposer organisms, the energy flow as well as the concept of chemical energy. The results also suggest that familiarity with concepts is key to activate patterns of complex causal reasoning. Among the study's didactic implications, the need to make explicit the relationship between the contents of biology, chemistry and physics is thus pointed out.