TEACHER'S BELIEFS ABOUT ABILITIES IN THE SCHOOL CONTEXT AND HISTORICAL CULTURAL THEORY

The category "ability", as well as "competence", has relevance in the organization and development of the curriculum in basic education, so the interest of studying the teachers' thinking about what are abilities and their training. This article presents the results of an exploratory research that identified and characterized the beliefs of teachers in basic public school education about the abilities and their training in the school context, considering the role of this type of knowledge for the professional activity of teaching. The research had as reference the contributions of the Historical-Cultural theory of L. S. Vygotsky and some of its followers. For data collection instrument, the researchers conveniently prepared, validated and used a normative, Likert-type questionnaire. Among the most important results, it appears that, in the teachers' belief model, there is a gap with regard to the theoretical reference matrix, especially in the understanding of abilities as the type of activity that implies the non-conscious domain of its operational structure oriented to the application of knowledge, as well as that the abilities have the same structure as the competences. This knowledge of teachers' beliefs about the aforementioned field of professional activity is a key element that must be taken into account in teacher training and professional development programs.