Abstract
This study aimed at finding out how young children express their thinking about some of the themes in the early-grades school science curriculum. Foundation-phase children at a primary school in Soweto, Johannesburg, were interviewed after they had watched classroom demonstrations of the production of carbon dioxide gas, absorption of water and the propulsion of an inflated balloon and after a discussion about living organisms had been introduced. Interviews were conducted in each of four classes, ranging from grade R to grade 3, asking questions about what they had just observed in the four different lessons. The findings show that the children expressed their own ideas, but that they were using the discourse structure of causality, albeit that the content of the reasoning came from their naïve or intuitive theories. The article recommends that teachers in the primary school consider (and utilise) children’s spontaneous reasoning and naïve or intuitive theories of natural phenomena when they teach the natural science curriculum. This study has shown that, although early-grades children may lack formal science concepts, their ability to reason is developed sufficiently to grasp the causal relationships in natural phenomena. The question this research asks, ultimately, is, ‘How can some basic science concepts be woven into the curriculum of the entire foundation phase curriculum, integrating it with language and literacy, and especially with mathematics?’. The author argues that firmer conceptual knowledge of science can be developed in younger children in the early grades, because the thinking mechanisms for understanding and reasoning seem to be in place at a young age.
Highlights
Before children reach the formal science class in the upper grades of the primary school, they are already familiar with many ideas about science and have developed what various authors describe as ‘naïve’ concepts (Spelke 2010) or ‘intuitive’ theories
Vosniadou and Ioannides (1998) argue that one of the most important findings from cognitive developmental research is that children do not enter the science class room as a blank slate, but rather, as a ‘messy slate’, because of their everyday interaction with the natural world and, I would add, in which they have formed their own working theories
Examples of how children learn the effects of certain actions in the physical world, such as falling down a staircase when moving too fast, getting burnt when touching the flame of a candle, making a ‘mess’ when a container filled with liquid falls to the ground, are many. Because they live, in a sociocultural setting, where language is learned spontaneously, they chance to know the linguistic discourse markers of causality, such as, ‘if that happens, it is likely that this will follow’. This linguistic structure is, according to some of the authors who study children’s development (Gopnik 2003; Gopnik et al 2001), their development of language with which to make their way in the sociocultural world, which is one scaffolding framework for causal reasoning
Summary
Laying the foundation for science concept developmentBefore children reach the formal science class in the upper grades of the primary school (known as ‘the intermediate phase’ in South Africa), they are already familiar with many ideas about science and have developed what various authors describe as ‘naïve’ concepts (Spelke 2010) or ‘intuitive’ theories Vosniadou and Ioannides (1998) argue that one of the most important findings from cognitive developmental research is that children do not enter the science class room as a blank slate, but rather, as a ‘messy slate’, because of their everyday interaction with the natural world and, I would add, in which they have formed their own working theories. By this way, they build rich personal knowledge.
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