Typical Didactical Activities in the Greek Early-Years Science Classroom: Do they promote science learning?

This paper presents an epistemological analysis of typical didactical activities noted in early-years science lessons, which was carried out in an attempt to diagnose the extent to which the teaching practices adopted by early-years educators are successful in supporting young children’s understanding in science. The analysis of didactical activities used a framework that allowed us to discover whether they promoted desired connections between theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world. Theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world are entities internal to scientific inquiry and, in educational contexts, connections between them are considered essential in assisting the development of young children’s scientific thinking. The results indicated that in the early-years science classroom scientific activity was mainly confined to the representational level. Intervention practices into the material world were limited, and were based on collected evidence. No interventions based on ideas were identified in the science lessons. Missing links between evidence and theory and between ideas and the material world suggest that the didactical activities analysed did not promote scientific understanding

Learning Process Studies

International audienceIn 1991, an international workshop held in Bremen was working on " Research in Physics Learning-Theoretical Issues and Empirical Studies " (Duit, Goldberg, Niedderer 1992). The intention of this workshop was to develop a new research goal, which was to study learning processes with data from during the learning process. The main point, which often makes learning process studies very important and interesting is the following: Students' actual constructions are often different from taught knowledge. In other words: there is a gap between what we teach and what is learnt (McDermott 1991), the knowledge to be taught is different from students' steps of learning (Tiberghien 1997). The students undertake a cognitive development, which leads them towards constructing certain "intermediate conceptions" (see below) corresponding to their cognitive structure (Niedderer 2001). In this paper, we are presenting some theoretical and methodological issues together with some results from new studies (Givry 2003; Budde 2004). 2. Theoretical framework Conceptions and expressed ideas Many authors use the term "conception" to denote their basic concept of thinking and learning (see Duit 2004). A conception is seen as a hypothetical set of statements, skills, procedures, that the researcher attributes to one or more students in order to account for students' behaviour in a set of given situations (Tiberghien 1997). Here, we distinguish between two cases: (1) One is to consider that a conception intends to be part of modelling students' mind. It is a construction of a researcher to describe typical use of elements of knowledge and ways of thinking of students. A conception has to be stable and must appear in more than one context and point in time. (2) The other is to consider that the researcher infers only ideas, which are expressed in the students' productions without making hypotheses on students' mind (Givry and Roth in press). These inferences will be called " expressed-ideas " to distinguish them from the previous approach. These two approaches show that, even if the points of view on the students' mind modelling are different, the analysis and the results on learning are compatible and mutually reinforced. Both approaches are inferred from students' productions (utterances, gestures, writing) by the researcher and can show some stability over time (Niedderer 2001) and through several situations (Givry 2003). The set of these situations represent their domain of validity, this domain can be reduced to a single situation or be stable in several situations. In both cases there is a construction of a researcher, which describes the core of several ideas of students in the researchers own words using the most distinctive features of those ideas for this description. This procedure is also aiming at a considerable reduction of data, describing the core of a set of ideas in a set of situations with one conception. Learning processes Often, learning processes 1 can be represented as a sequence of conceptions developed by students during instruction. These conceptions do not exclude each other; a student can have 1 The use of the term process here can be justified by stating that it describes a series of steps, which allow to acquire the scientific taught concepts and then are a student's way of going from initial to final conceptions ("learning pathway")

EBook proceedings of the ESERA 2011 conference : science learning and citizenship

This ebook contains fourteen parts according to the strands of the ESERA 2011 conference. Each part is co-edited by one or two persons, most of them were strand chairs. All papers in this ebook correspond to accepted communications during the ESERA conference that were reviewed by two referees. Moreover the co-editors carried out a global reviewing of the papers.ESERA - European Science Education Research Associatio

Teaching and Learning Pressure and Fluids

This essay is a synthesis of more than twenty years of research, already published, on teaching and learning fluids and pressure. We examine teaching fluids globally, i.e., the content to be taught and its transformations, students’ alternative conceptions and their remediation, the sequence of educational activities, being right for students’ understanding, as well as tasks for evaluating their conceptual evolution. Our samples are junior high school students and primary school student-teachers. This long-term study combines research and development concerning teaching and learning fluids and has evolved through iteratively based design application and reflective feedback related to empirical data. The results of our research include several publications