Exploring How Children Use Their Everyday Thinking to Construct Scientific Explanations of the Natural World

Abstract

The purpose of this qualitative grounded theory study was to describe and explain children’s thinking present in multiple related contexts surrounding a single Earth Space disciplinary core idea in order to provide insight on whether and how children’s everyday thinking forms the basis for learning in science classrooms. As most previous work on children’s thinking focuses more on what ideas and thinking are present within specific science learning contexts, there is a knowledge gap as to how children’s everyday ideas across multiple contexts provide the basis from which they construct a deeper conceptual understanding about scientific phenomenon in the world around them. This knowledge gap needs to be addressed since we know from prior research that children’s everyday thinking both in and out of school provides the basis for meaningful science learning in classrooms (NRC, 2012). Five more chapters follow. Chapter 1 details how I became positioned to do this work as I note my previous experiences as an elementary science teacher and as a graduate research assistant. Chapter 2 begins with an argument grounded in the literature for the importance of children’s everyday thinking and ideas in meaningful science learning. In reviewing the literature, I situate my work among approaches and findings from previous studies on understanding children’s everyday thinking and ideas in science. In this chapter I also discuss different theories of learning and knowledge that serve as the basis of this dissertation work. In Chapter 3, I set the groundwork for my analyses by describing a threefold study design in which I examined eleven 5th grade students’ ideas and thinking about why stars can only be seen in the sky at night. In Chapter 4, I present the results of my analysis of the interview transcripts and student artifact data revealing that children have a range of knowledge pieces—some similar and others unique—for reasoning about why stars can only be seen in the sky at night and they assemble the pieces of knowledge to form coherent explanations in a range of ways. Finally, in Chapter 5, I discuss these key findings indicating that these eleven children’s everyday thinking and ideas do in fact contain productive pieces of knowledge for science learning, including both knowledge of science content and scientific practices. I discuss the implications this work has for the teaching and learning of science, and I identify how I think this work can be used to inform