Dioramas of the natural world: Brazilian primary school pupils´ drawings

People come to the museum to look at natural history dioramas with a wealth of previous relevant knowledge and experience as well as expectations, which may differ amongst members of the same visiting group. The museum which houses the dioramas also has its own “voice” heard through in the context in which the dioramas are sited and in the form that the dioramas take as well as interpretations provided about the content, the story of the dioramas from the perspective ecological and geographic. This exploratory study considers which impact wildlife dioramas may have on the content of drawings performed by twenty-eight girls and thirty-one boys enrolled in a private school. Children´s understanding about organisms may be investigated by examining the mental model revealed through their drawings, their expressed model, of what they anticipate they will see and what they recall they have seen after such a visit. The mental model is the scientific knowledge (appearance of the animal and its ecological habitat). Children from this investigation revealed in their post-visit representations a larger knowledge mainly of mammals and birds but almost nothing about ecological relationships and plants