Abstract
We report a longitudinal study carried out along 3 years in an early childhood education (ECE) classroom in which we examined children’s (aged 3–6) engagement with science representations. The research questions are as follows: (1) How do children’s science representations develop from ECE1 to ECE3? (2) What are the features and affordances of the teacher’s scaffolding of the production of science representations and how is it facilitated from the first to the third year of ECE? The participants were 21 children and their teacher. The group was involved in long-term science projects that lasted for 5 months each. Sessions (N = 30) were recorded and children’s drawings (N = 487) gathered. Data were analyzed using discourse and content analyses, coupled with an analysis of the intensity of scaffolding. The results indicate that children’s representations of science phenomena became more complex along several dimensions. We have identified teacher’s scaffolding strategies which supported children’s increasing autonomy in producing representations. Implications are drawn for teaching science at the ECE level as well as for further research.
Highlights
Representations are cultural tools and practices, and they are critical in how learners make sense of the world (Fleer and Pramling 2015)
This study provides a characterization of the ways in which a teacher supported her 3–6year-old pupils’ engagement in building representations through repeated and careful scaffolds during early childhood education (ECE) classes and through creating an environment that supports the building of representations
This section discusses results related to RQ1: How do children’s science representations develop from ECE1 to ECE3? First, we summarize the overall findings from the content analysis of what children represented and how their drawings changed
Summary
Representations are cultural tools and practices, and they are critical in how learners make sense of the world (Fleer and Pramling 2015). At the early childhood level, as children become enculturated to schooling and to the practices of science, they develop the ability to understand, learn, and build through and with representations, a process which is mediated by the context of the classroom. This research is part of a multiple case study, accompanying three ECE groups (e.g., Monteira and JiménezAleixandre 2016, 2019), with the goal of advancing the field’s understandings about how ECE children learn science. This is an appropriate design to study a reality beyond the researcher’s control and in which the boundaries within the phenomenon under study and the context are not well-defined (Yin 2003). Ariadna Colored cumuli on the top, without Blue No landscape
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