The kingdom of fungi in primary school: an educational research in biology field.

This educational research has been conducted since a concrete situation which characterizes the teaching of Science in the Italian school system was found. Although scientists demonstrated for a long time the effectiveness of socio-cultural and cultural-historical constructivist theories on which scientific learning models are based, today we find that the teaching of Science in schools is not always based on these paradigms. In particular, it often happens that the laboratory is designed as an appendage of the theory or as a physical space, while it should be considered as a way of working, where the teacher plays the role of the director and s/he encourages children to be actors and not spectators. Therefore, we decided to conduct this research with the aim of validating the usefulness and the effectiveness of the teaching laboratory in the teaching-learning process of Biology in primary school and to assess the possibility of introducing the discussion of the Kingdom of fungi in the program. The present work involves the design and the construction of a project on the Kingdom of fungi, with particular reference to classification and morphology. We decided to approach this subject because in various Italian regulatory documents, including the recent National Guidelines, there has been a complete lack of interest in microorganisms and fungi. In order to confirm the effectiveness of the teaching laboratory, we chose to deal with this theme first by using a transmission method and then proposing numerous laboratory activities, thus providing the opportunity to develop a comparison between these two teaching methods. At the end of this research, it can be stated that the analysis of the results confirms the experimental hypothesis. It was found out that the pupils fully learned the concepts and, despite the difficulties, developed critical attitudes towards phenomena, showing a significant improvement between the first and the second assessment. Regarding the discussion of the Kingdom of fungi, it appeared that this type of project allows the pupils to develop a deep interest in these organisms, thus demonstrating the importance of introducing this fundamental topic of Biology in primary school.