Taking Science to School Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Part II - How Children Learn Science: 3 Foundations for Science Learning in Young Children
Part II - How Children Learn Science: 3 Foundations for Science Learning in Young Children
Pages 51-92
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From page 51... ...
Chapter 3 reviews research on young children and provides an overview of the knowledge and skills they bring to school which provide a foundation for learning science. Chapter 4 reviews literature related to Strand 1: Know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world.
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From page 52... ...
Another major theme across Part II is the strong evidence from current research that children are more capable than was once thought and that implementation of the strands framework could begin as early as kindergar ten. In fact, basic research in cognitive development over the past few de cades has revolutionized the view of how children's minds develop, from infancy through adolescence.
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From page 53... ...
Regardless of one's theoretical orientation, by the time children enter elementary school, no one would argue that their minds are empty vessels awaiting enlightenment in the form of instruction. They come to school after years of cognitive growth in which they have developed a wide range of ways of understanding and reasoning about the world around them.
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From page 54... ...
This knowledge can emerge as a consequence of a child's every day interactions with the world as well as a result of the ways in which the culture and its adult members explicitly impart information to children. In some areas of instruction, such as reading, the role of preexisting knowl edge and understanding may be relatively modest, but in the area of science education, children bring a great deal that is relevant.
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From page 55... ...
For example, preschool children have often been claimed to be concrete, preoperational, precausal, prelogical, and lacking the ability to think in relational terms. Only during the elementary school years, or in some cases not until adolescence, were children thought to transition to "higher" forms of thought.
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From page 56... ...
All three of these views, as well as other views of broad cognitive limitations of elementary schoolchildren, and even many preschoolers, are no longer accepted by the cognitive develop mental research community (see Carey, 1985; Gelman and Baillargeon, 1983; Gelman and Kalish, 2005; and Metz, 1995, for reviews)
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From page 57... ...
They are definitely not in the form laid down in Newton's Principia, but they do enable infants and children to anticipate and interpret many aspects of their physical worlds. The research literature on infants' conceptions of physical objects has burgeoned in the past two decades and cannot possibly be fully surveyed here (see Baillargeon, 2004; Cohen and Cashon, 2006; Mandler, 2004; Munakata, Casey, and Diamond, 2004, for discussions of large segments of this literature)
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From page 58... ...
Next, a large box is placed behind the screen. In the possible event, the screen stops when it encounters the box (112 degree arc)
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From page 59... ...
. Regardless of the details of how quickly infants gain a single clear view of the nature of the physical world, there is substantial agreement that, by the end of the first year of life, they have expectations about objects that fit with many principles governing the behaviors of bounded physical objects.
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From page 60... ...
will do so and will therefore gain valuable new information concerning the mechanics of physical objects. Finally, knowl edge can sometimes be implicit in a child's action before it is accessible for other, more explicit uses.
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; there have been many fewer studies of younger preschool or elementary schoolchildren (Doran, 1972; Ioannides and Vosniadou, 2002; Viennot, 1979)
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From page 62... ...
con tinue a short way off the cliff before abruptly falling straight down. Although even young children, like adults, have an explicit concept of force that they use to explain what happens in different physical situations, the meaning of force is an intuitive one, very different from the mathematicized notion embodied in Newtonian mechanics.
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From page 63... ...
and their actions corresponds roughly to the research areas of psychology and cognitive science. Although psychology and cognitive science are not typically areas of science instruction in the elementary school, much of the scholarship in those fields arises from experimental research very much in the tradition of the biological and physical sciences.The contrast between simple mechanical objects and intentional agents is one of the most robust and earliest emerging cognitive distinctions in development.
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From page 64... ...
One of the most discussed developments concerns the emergence, during the third year of life, of an ability to understand that intentional agents might have false beliefs that lead them to behave differ ently from when they might have true beliefs (Perner, Leekam, and Wimmer,
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From page 65... ...
In short, from early in infancy, the social world is seen as patterning in dramatically different ways from the physical world. Infants have entirely different sets of expectations about entities in the two worlds, expectations Tasks Used to Study Children's Ideas About the Mind BOX 3-2 In a standard test for children's understanding of false belief (Wimmer and Perner, 1983)
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From page 66... ...
First, they are domains of scientific activity, and the child's intuitive knowledge can be understood as forming the basis for later explicit instruction on the topic. Second, the cognitive science of science itself is an important part of the science education of the child (Klahr, 2000)
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From page 67... ...
. An understanding of the biological world as a domain with its own principles is thought not to emerge until well into the elementary school years (Carey, 1985, 1988)
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From page 68... ...
. Children may zero in on the domain of living things by realizing that they occur at the intersection of two kinds of causal and relational patterns, each of which individually may apply to entities in multiple domains, but which in concert uniquely pick out the living world (Keil, 1992)
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From page 69... ...
The most dramatic cases of cognitive change seem to involve learning about more detailed mechanisms of biological systems, much of this occurring during the elementary school years. In addition, an explicit awareness of plants and animals as a distinct domain governed by unique sets of mechanistic principles may undergo considerable development during childhood; it may change from a simple notion of seeing plants and animals as special because of a vital force to seeing them as engaging in unique metabolic activities (Inagaki and Hatano, 2002, 2006)
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From page 70... ...
There are, however, other ways of thinking about matter, substance, and transformation that appear to have much earlier developmental roots. Although there has been much less research on infants' and preschool children's understandings of matter and materials than their understandings in other domains, a consistent pattern is suggested.
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From page 71... ...
Although children were far from perfect in their judgments, especially when materials have been ground into powders or invisible pieces, these and other studies (e.g., Gelman and Markman, 1986, 1987) have shown that preschool children, like adults, can use a notion of material kinds as a basis for making inductive inferences about the properties of things, even when such judgments are pitted against judgments based on global perceptual similarity.
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From page 72... ...
. How ever, although there is still much for children to learn, even in preschool they are making some distinctions between object and material levels of description in organizing their knowledge of the natural world.
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. Cosmology and earth sciences offer an especially interesting case in which the history of science and cognitive development can be compared and contrasted for mutually reinforcing insights (Duschl, 2000)
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From page 74... ...
In short, the emergence of a folk cosmology and an intuitive earth sci ence in the preschool and early elementary school years forms a critical skeletal structure within which more formal science curricula must function. Of all five domains considered here, some of the most dramatic changes may occur during the elementary school years with respect to cosmology; but these changes hardly occur in an intellectually empty or unformed mind.
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From page 75... ...
For example, reasoning about covariation and cause has been an active area of research on scientific reasoning in older children. Research has demonstrated that even preschool children are adept at using a variety of cues from the environment to identify the cause of an event from a set of potential candidates.
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From page 76... ...
Young children also demonstrate capacities that can be seen as the foun dation for modeling. The developmental literature illustrates that there are myriad ways in which even preschool children come to regard one thing as representing another.
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. However, even preschool children can reason about counterfactuals if the problem is presented in a context in which such reasoning makes sense.
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For example, it reveals the child's growing understanding of the active role of the knower in knowledge construction, negating any simple correspondence between observing and knowing. Understanding what ideas are and what they are not is prerequisite to doing science in a meaningful way.
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False belief is an essential component to mature learning as well as scientific practice. The inquiry process hinges on treating ideas as plausible and testing them empirically before determining their value.
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From page 80... ...
They also show marked changes during late preschool and early elementary school in their ability to discount informa tion given by others if they see that person as having suspect motivations. In addition, they start to understand the general nature of testimony and the different pressure points that can make it fallible.
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From page 81... ...
However, very little research has explored this issue. Some suggestions about what first graders may think about science comes from the work of Gertrude Hennessey, a science education researcher as well as a grade 1-6 science teacher, who asked her students to respond to the question "What is science?
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From page 82... ...
During the preschool years, children develop an awareness of other people's minds that reveals a growing understanding of the active role of the knower in knowledge construction. This ability to consider ideas and beliefs as separate from the material world is foundational for engaging in debates about the interpretation of evidence.
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From page 83... ...
Child Development, 60, 946-964. Bertamini, M., Spooner A., and Hecht, H
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. Misconceptions of selected science held by elementary school students.
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From page 85... ...
Child Development, 58, 1532-1541. Gergeley, G., Nadasdy, Z., Csibra, G., and Biro, S
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From page 86... ...
Evidence of an early conception of plants as biological kinds. Child Development, 66, 856-876.
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From page 87... ...
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 79-83.
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Amsel, (Eds.) , Language, literacy, and cognitive development: The development and consequences of symbolic communication (pp.
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Science Education, 60, 535-550. Nussbaum, J
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From page 90... ...
. Never getting to zero: Elementary school students' understanding of the infinite divisibility of number and matter.
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From page 91... ...
European Jour nal of Science Education, 1, 205-221. Vosniadou, S
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From page 92... ...
. From conceptual development to science education: A psychological point of view.
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