Innovating: cartoons as a strategy to improve understanding of social sciences in secondary school

Abstract

The area of Social Sciences aims to provide an understanding of the cultural, social, political and economic processes that occur in space and time. Therefore, addressing these topics in the classroom implies that there are many subjects in the curriculum, which in the students’ perception can become monotonous, memoristic and difficult to understand. Therefore, didactic strategies that favor the teaching-learning process are necessary. Under this perspective, the present study aims to assess the impact of the use of the didactic strategy of cartoons to improve comprehension in Social Sciences in secondary school at the Institución Educativa Distrital Grancolombiano (Bogotá-Colombia). The method used was the inductive method, using the
mixed approach, which integrates the qualitative method and the quantitative method. A total of 360 seventh grade students participated, of which a sample of 128 students was classified, distributed between the control group and the experimental group. The results of the study show that the students were able to improve their understanding of the economic and political aspects from Social Science. Regarding the hypothesistesting,a normal distribution is presented, taking into account the arithmetic mean obtained from the total of the questions µ= 22.4 and the general standard deviation = 19.7, which indicates that the probability of success of the primary hypothesis is approximately 95%. From the results obtained, new lines of research are opened on other areas present in Social Science, and it is even possible to separate the handling of the competences of interpretation, relation, argumentation and proposition taking into account gender and age to estimate the levels of comprehension and make possible the inclusion of different cartoons in order to improve the teaching-learning processes.