PROBLEMATIZANDO A NOÇÃO DE PROVA COM BASE EM ESTUDOS DE HISTÓRIA DA COSMOLOGIA E NATUREZA DA CIÊNCIA

Research on views of the nature of science (NoS) among students and teachers in basic education has identified, for decades, a predominance of views considered "inadequate," "distorted," or "underinformed." Much of these conceptions are related to an excessive trust in the authority of science, overemphasizing the role of experimentation to prove that scientific theories are supposedly true. This issue has strengthened in the last decade as one of the most urgent challenges for science education research due to the rise of scientific denialism, which also involves a naive questioning of the legitimacy of scientific research. Based on studies of the history of cosmology in the 20th century, particularly in the controversy between the Big Bang theory and the Steady State universe, we argue that this episode has the potential to promote explicit discussions about the concept of evidence in science and, therefore, to contribute to problematizing scientistic and denialist views in teacher education. The present research empirically reinforces the argument that a contextual approach to scientific topics, based on the history of science, contributes to science education aiming for a better understanding of scientific dynamics.