THE STUDY OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY THROUGH THE THEORY OF SIGNIFICANT LEARNING
RELATIVITY, TRE APPLICATION
The teaching units are, in general terms, didactic tools created to improve the teaching and learning process of a topic. The work developed here was the elaboration of a Potentially Significant Teaching Unit (PSTU), based on David Ausubel's theory of learning. His work is about the initial concepts taught to high school students about Albert Einstein's Special or Restricted Relativity. The PSTU: THE STUDY OF SPECIAL RELATIVITY THROUGH THE THEORY OF SIGNIFICANT LEARNING was conducted in two classes, composed by students, mostly from the second year of High School education and few students of undergraduate courses in Physics and Mathematics of the Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Norte. Nevertheless, none of them had contact with this topic before. The PSTU was developed to discuss the relativity theory and proved to be successful, as evidenced by the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative results that were obtained and can be consulted in chapter 4 of this work. The differential of PSTU: The study of Special Relativity through the Theory of meaningful learning is the use of the Einstein TRE Application, developed to be applied during all the classes about Restricted Relativity, with no loss of knowledge, since it has a vies of teaching product and may be used, at the same time as the classes. However, it was presented to students in the final stage of the teaching unit.