Abstract
Some science educators claim that children enter science classrooms with a conception of heat considered by physicists to be incorrect and speculate that “misconceptions” may result from the way heat is talked about in everyday language (e.g., Lautrey and Mazens, 2004; Slotta and Chi, 2006). We investigated talk about heat in naturalistic conversation to explore the claim that children often hear heat discussed as a substance rather than as a process, potentially hindering later learning of heat as energy involved in emergent processes. We explored naturalistic speech among children and adults to understand the nature and the frequency of heat- and temperature-related conversations that young children are involved in. This study aims to investigate the actual linguistic resources that children have available as part of a sociocultural approach to cognitive development. Parents’ everyday conversations about heat and temperature with their 2–6-year-old children were drawn from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) language database and from a parent–child book-reading study. Parents used the word heat rarely, but they did so in ways that implied it is a substance. Parents never talked about heat as an emergent process but sometimes as a direct causal process. Most of the heat- and temperature-related talk, however, focused on words like hot and cold to describe temperature as a property of objects. This investigation of what young children actually experience in everyday conversations is a step toward studying how everyday language may play a role in children’s understanding of heat and temperature.
Highlights
Children develop “intuitive” ideas about key physical concepts and phenomena through everyday navigation of their environments and activities (Piaget, 1974; diSessa, 1996; Wellman and Gelman, 1998; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 2002; Wilkening and Huber, 2004), and yet paradoxically, they often have great difficulty understanding similar concepts later in science classrooms (e.g., McCloskey, 1983). Debates about this discrepancy between “naïve” physics and formal physics have often pitted theories that emphasize the cognitive aspects of conceptual change against theories that emphasize the processes of reasoning occurring in the context of phenomenological experience or sociocultural activities
Despite extensive evidence of young children’s clear expression of temperature concepts in everyday language, understanding the concepts of heat and temperature in formal science instruction proves to be difficult for many students even in high school (e.g., Clough and Driver, 1985; Erickson and Tiberghien, 1985; Lewis and Linn, 1994)
Analysis 2 explores the range of different heat- and temperature-related words parents and children used, asking how often they occurred in everyday conversations, and how often they were used as property, substance, or process
Summary
Children develop “intuitive” ideas about key physical concepts and phenomena through everyday navigation of their environments and activities (Piaget, 1974; diSessa, 1996; Wellman and Gelman, 1998; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 2002; Wilkening and Huber, 2004), and yet paradoxically, they often have great difficulty understanding similar concepts later in science classrooms (e.g., McCloskey, 1983) Debates about this discrepancy between “naïve” physics and formal physics have often pitted theories that emphasize the cognitive aspects of conceptual change against theories that emphasize the processes of reasoning occurring in the context of phenomenological experience or sociocultural activities. Chi and colleagues (Slotta et al, 1995; Chi, 2005) argue that students incorrectly conceptualize heat as a substance, which leads to a difficulty in understanding heat as an emergent process
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