Taking Science to School Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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4 Knowledge and Understanding of the Natural World
4 Knowledge and Understanding of the Natural World
Pages 93-128
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From page 93... ...
Such changes are facilitated by instruction that helps stu dents construct an understanding of the new concepts, and provides opportunities for them to strengthen their understanding of the new ideas through extended application and argumentation. In this chapter we summarize research related to Strand 1: know, use, and interpret scientific knowledge of the natural world.
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From page 94... ...
CHANGES IN CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING DURING THE K-8 YEARS There is no magic line that divides children's cognitive development before entering elementary school from their cognitive development after the onset of formal schooling. Children continue to refine their abilities to use information at various levels of abstraction and become ever more so phisticated at understanding the nature of good explanations, methods of inquiry, and the role of evidence.
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From page 95... ...
More broadly, conceptual change may be more difficult when the child's naïve conception assigns entities in a domain to a different ontological category than an adult's conception assigns them (Chi, 2005)
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From page 96... ...
. Extending and Changing Understandings of Naïve Physics Children's understanding of the simple mechanics of bounded objects undergoes considerable change during the elementary school years.
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From page 97... ...
More broadly, it can take years for elementary school children to start to understand systems like gears and levers in more formal terms that allow more correct generalizations across instances (Lehrer and Schauble, 1998)
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From page 98... ...
There is also an increas ing appreciation of the depth of biological taxonomies, with an emerging awareness of different subclasses of species, such as breeds of dogs. In addition to the accumulation of facts, children in the elementary school years also appear to show restructuring of knowledge.
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From page 99... ...
Again, not only are elementary schoolchildren missing many details about the workings of plants and animals, but they also have a number of misconceptions. For example, as children come to recognize that plants are living things, they begin to overgeneralize that plants eat, sleep, etc.
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From page 100... ...
. Thus, they lack distinct descriptions of processes at the atomic-molecular and cellular levels that would provide deeper, mechanistic explanations for macroscopic phenomena.
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From page 101... ...
. Expanding Understandings of Matter and Its Transformation We discussed how preschool conceptions of matter and its transformation continue to change in the elementary school years.
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From page 102... ...
. Thus, elementary schoolchildren often have difficulty seeing how micro-level entities are related to macro level ones, sometimes thinking that everything must appear the same at all levels of analysis (Nakhleh and Samarapungavan, 1999)
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From page 103... ...
These insights, however, are only the beginning of a long process of increasingly subtle insights into the workings of the minds of others, insights that continue well into adolescence. For example, only in the middle of elementary school do children start to clearly understand that an individual can simultaneously have two conflicting desires or beliefs (Choe, Keil, and Bloom, 2005)
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From page 104... ...
It is worth briefly noting, however, that a great deal of detailed knowledge about cos mology can be acquired during the elementary school and middle school years, although progress here is typically quite variable. Many children learn more and more about astronomical bodies and their distinctions, such as stars and planets.
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From page 105... ...
It is easy to see how notions of mechanics, folk psychology and folk biology, for example, persist into later childhood and influence the ways in which more detailed mental models are constructed. Second, a great deal of development during the elementary school years involves learning about more detailed mechanisms and facts in various domains.
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From page 106... ...
Finally, the elementary school years and beyond can include impressive periods of conceptual change. Children will come to reassign entities to differ ent ontological categories, they will put together concepts to create new ones, and they seem to have dramatic new insights that can change the way they understand a whole domain.
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From page 107... ...
Some researchers suggest that children's concepts may differ from those of scientists because they are embedded in different theories or constrained by somewhat different assumptions about the origins of the natural world and the nature of knowledge. Clearly, the current theories of science are immense intellectual achievements that are the products of centuries of investigation and testing carried out by entire communities of adult experts.
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From page 108... ...
Conceptual differentiations are typically accompanied by conceptual coalescences, another fundamental form of conceptual change. In co alescences, the descendant theory introduces a new concept that unites con cepts previously seen to be of fundamentally different types in the parent theory.
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From page 109... ...
In coalescence, the initial concepts are thought to be fundamentally different kinds, and the properties or relations that will be central to defining the new superordinate category are not explicitly represented or considered central to the initial concepts. Two additional forms of conceptual change frequently accompany conceptual differentiations and coalescences and can contribute to the restructuring: (1)
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From page 110... ...
Mechanisms of Conceptual Change One reason for distinguishing more fundamental, "revolutionary" con ceptual changes from belief revision or conceptual elaboration is that these more profound forms of change may require a more complex coordination of a variety of learning mechanisms than more typical learning does. Most everyday learning involves knowledge enrichment and rests on an assumed set of concepts.
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From page 111... ...
. Even preschool children have some metacognitive abilities, but major expansions in these abilities during the elementary school years may create especially powerful support for more dramatic forms of conceptual change.
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From page 112... ...
Elementary schoolchildren have much more capacity for metacognitively guided learning than has been commonly supposed or taken advantage of by existing science curricula (see Hennessey, 2003, for a detailed analysis of the subtle and diverse expressions of metacognitive understandings shown
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From page 113... ...
. These abilities are typically overlooked and untapped in traditional approaches to science teaching, and, as a result, they not only fail to develop those abilities further, but also reduce the chances of conceptual change.
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From page 114... ...
For example, even 3-year-olds can engage in analogical reasoning (Goswami and Brown, 1990) ; they can also engage in inference to best explanation, as when they infer a hidden causal mechanism to explain an observable event (Bullock An Example of Discovery Argumentation BOX 4-1 An example of a powerful form of discovery argumentation is the "bridging analogies" strategy (Brown and Clement, 1989; Clement, 1993)
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From page 115... ...
. Thus, conceptual change researchers are finding that in volving elementary, middle, and high school students in discovery argumenta tion via cycles of model-based reasoning -- practices very similar to those used by scientists themselves -- are highly effective means of building these new understandings (Brown and Clement, 1989; Lehrer et al., 2001; Smith et al., 1997; Stewart, Cartier, and Passmore, 2005; White, 1993; Wiser and Amin, 2001)
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From page 116... ...
Even elementary school students are sensitive to many of these features in judging rival accounts. More specifically, Samarapungavan (1992)
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From page 117... ...
Indeed, many science educators believe that a key to promoting conceptual change in the classroom is to create a more reflective classroom discourse that is structured around explicit argumentation (Hennessey, 2003; Herrenkohl and Guerra, 1998; van Zee and Minstrell, 1997)
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From page 118... ...
As mentioned earlier, however, memory and attentional changes can sometimes also be linked to conceptual change and, in such cases, bring conceptual change back into the process of developmental change. CONCLUSIONS As children enter elementary school, the pace of change in their knowl edge and understanding of the natural world continues and sometimes seems to dramatically accelerate.
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From page 119... ...
Admittedly, children's understandings of the world sometimes contradict scientific explanations, and these conceptions about the natural world can pose obstacles to learning science. However, their prior knowledge also offers leverage points that can be built on to develop their understanding of scientific concepts and their ability to engage in scientific investigations.
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From page 120... ...
Science Education, 69, 721-733.
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From page 121... ...
, Relating macroscopic phenomena to microscopic particles: A central problem in secondary science education (pp.
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From page 122... ...
International Journal of Science Education, 11, 554-565. Confrey, J
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From page 123... ...
International Journal of Science Education, 269-286. Gellert, E
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From page 124... ...
International Journal of Science Education, 22(7)
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From page 125... ...
International Journal of Behavioral Development, 25, 466 480. Mayer, E
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From page 126... ...
. Conceptual change in science and in science education.
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From page 127... ...
Science Education, 88, 345-372. Schwab, J
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From page 128... ...
. From conceptual development to science education: A psychological point of view.
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