CHILDRENS REPRESENTATIONS OF THE AMAZONIA N ENVIRONMENT - IMPLICATIONS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL-EDUCATION

The purpose of this research was to study children's representations a nd ideas that support the knowledge about Amazonian ecosystem and the human action upon it. The subjects were fifty-six urban schoolchildren from 10 to 14 years old. The study compared the representations level s presented by the group that participate in a program of environmenta l education based on a constructivist theory and their controls. The r esults showed that the children who participated in the program increa sed ecological knowledge of the rain forest and improved their social skills meanwhile the children from the control group maintained ecolog ical and social concepts without any comprehension of interdependency between the organisms and most of human's actions. This paper also dis cusses the representations and cognitive levels held by the participat ing subjects.