Young Children Can Be Sophisticated Scientists

Abstract

Since the first international comparison of student achievement in mathematics and science, we've been worried about the disappointing showing by U.S. students. However, while the United States has tried to improve mathematics achievement in every grade from kindergarten to 12th, its efforts to improve education have emphasized only middle school and high school. Elementary school has been relatively neglected. One cause is an outdated idea that elementary school children aren't developmentally ready to handle complex science. But my research and that of others shows that young children can be surprisingly capable scientists. Their abilities far exceed the notions of age-appropriate in current curriculum policy documents. This means that today's curricula are unnecessarily watered down. What children know determines what they can learn next. we update our thinking about what young children can do with and give them more optimal learning opportunities, we may be able to significantly strengthen young children's scientific reasoning and position them to take on more rigorous curriculum in later grades. What Science? For many years, educators have categorized what is appropriate for children according to Jean Piaget's developmental stages. We've thought about kids' capabilities and deficiencies in terms of different grade bands, and we've thought about the science process skills that are available to them in those grade bands. But this approach substantially underestimates children's capabilities. One problem with Piaget's stages is that his investigations of children's scientific inquiry used tasks for which they had weak conceptual knowledge, thus handicapping their reasoning (Carey 1985). But how well children perform a task depends on both how well they reason and how well they know important concepts. As Susan Carey noted, If these concepts are not completely clear in the child's mind, due to incomplete scientific knowledge, then the child will, of course, be unable to separate them from each other in hypothesis testing and evaluation (1985: 498). Later work on children's development by Piaget (1978, 1980) and others (see Duschl, Schweingruber, and Shouse 2007) reveals that young children have a wide range of intellectual resources. But many educators have clung to the idea that young children have limited scientific reasoning capabilities. The developmental literature may identify the intellectual resources that children bring to the classroom, but it is blind to the capacities that children can reveal under better learning conditions. Recent research suggests that children's capabilities are surprisingly plastic and sensitive to the opportunities they have to learn. Stronger Science Instruction In my research, I analyze how well children can think scientifically when they get instruction that uses their intellectual resources to the fullest. One line of my work investigates the power of scientific inquiry in the hands of children in the primary grades (Metz 2004, 2008). More recently (Metz et al. 2010), I've been investigating the extent to which young children can understand core scientific ideas. From this work, I've developed five instructional design principles aimed at maximizing the power of children's scientific inquiry, and I've incorporated these principles into an elementary school curriculum. The design principles are: 1. Scaffold relatively rich knowledge, emphasizing big ideas that transcend the topic being studied. A solid grasp of concepts leads to better scientific reasoning. Unfortunately, U.S. curricula cover many topics superficially (Valverde and Schmidt 2000), undermining in-depth conceptual understanding. This instructional model sacrifices coverage of many topics to go deep into strategically selected ones. This principle gives rise to the next two. …