New Perspectives in Science Education

Problem-Based Learning consists of an active strategy that involves students as a central part of knowledge processes. In this educational strategy, students face daily problems, search for viable, and properly founded solutions. In this research, after presenting a specific problem, it is important to analyse and reflect on previous approaches on the issue, looking for new information that will allow them to describe the state of the art and identifying already existing solutions. After selecting all significant information, participants discuss new purposes to solve the initial problem. In this process, the teacher is a moderator, helping students in this sequencing procedure that results in different solutions to be tested and to create new problems. The Learning Products for ALL (ProLearn4ALL) is a project that intends to impulse Higher Education toward reflections and solution purposes to respond this question: How can we create awareness in children from Primary School toward inclusion and help them to respect diversity, especially regarding disability? Therefore, this project intends to create a new pedagogic kit with ludic products for ALL children, allowing them to understand and respect disability characteristics. Higher Education students from different areas (Education, Arts and Communication) have been involved in several activities, from conception to prototype development, facing, in each part, a new problem different from the previous one. Their contributions, in any activity, improved this project, allowing the work team (students, professors and investigators) to reflect on the best ideas and to produce a kit with ludic and pedagogical books and games. This shared work developed student´s motivation to learn, increasing reflection skills and empowerment for the resolution problems, projecting those practices to their future work context.

Keywors: Educational strategies, Problem-based learning, Higher Education, ProLearn4ALL;