Suzanne Peterson

Multiple Representation in Learning About Evaporation

There has been extensive research on children’s understanding of evaporation, but representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. This study explored three students’ engagement with science concepts relating to evaporation through various representational modes, such as diagrams, verbal accounts, gestures, and captioned drawings. This engagement entailed students (a) clarifying their thinking through exploring representational resources; (b) developing understanding of what these representations signify; and (c) learning how to construct representational aspects of scientific explanation. The study involved a sequence of classroom lessons on evaporation and structured interviews with nine children, and found that a focus on representational challenges provided fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science. The findings suggest that teacher‐mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both (a) richer conceptual understanding by students; and (b) enhanced teacher insights into students’ thinking.

Tracing young children's scientific reasoning

This paper explores the scientific reasoning of 14 children across their first two years of primary school. Childrens view of experimentation, their approach to exploration, and their negotiation of competing knowledge claims, are interpreted in terms of categories of epistemological reasoning. Childrens epistemological reasoning is distinguished from their ability to control variables. While individual children differ substantially, they show a relatively steady growth in their reasoning, with some contextual variation. A number of these children are reasoning at a level well in advance of curriculum expectations, and it is argued that current recommended practice in primary science needs to be rethought. The data is used to explore the relationship between reasoning and knowledge, and to argue that the generation and exploration of ideas must be the key driver of scientific activity in the primary school.

Deconstructing learning in science -young children's responses to a classroom sequence on evaporation

Five year old childrens ideas were tracked by a range of means during and subsequent to a classroom sequence on evaporation. They held a range of conceptions which changed in complex ways across context and time. These could only be made sense of by moving outside traditional conceptual change interpretations to include broader notions of appropriation of language as a cultural tool, of personal and social narrative responses to features of the phenomena and the classroom setting, and the nature of science explanations. The findings are used to explore the relationship between social and individual perspectives on learning, and to question some assumptions underlying conceptual change research.

Young children learning about evaporation: a longitudinal perspective

This paper traces the learning pathways over a 4-year period of 12 children learning about evaporation. The findings show the complexity and dependence on context of children’s understandings. Detailed transcripts for 2 children are used to demonstrate how understandings of phenomena are framed within a network of personal narratives of self that reflect children’s different subjectivities as learners and school children. It is argued that the longitudinal methodology opens up a more complex and nuanced view of children’s conceptual learning in school settings than is afforded by cross-sectional studies and that the focus on individuals over time compels a very different construction of the learner than is represented in mainstream conceptual-change literature.Sommaire exécutifCet article esquisse les pistes d’apprentissage de douze enfants pour ce qui est de la notion d’évaporation, sur une période de quatre ans. Les résultats mettent en évidence la complexité et la dépendance contextuelle de la compréhension des concepts chez les enfants. Une transcription détaillée d’entrevues réalisées avec deux enfants est utilisée pour illustrer la façon dont la compréhension des phénomènes s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une série de récits personnels des enfants, récits qui reflètent la subjectivité différente de chaque enfant comme apprenant et comme élève. Nous estimons que, comparativement aux études transversales, la méthodologie longitudinale ouvre une perspective qui permet d’avoir une vision plus complexe et plus nuancée de l’apprentissage des concepts chez les enfants en milieu scolaire, et qu’une étude des individus sur une période plus étendue conduit obligatoirement à une construction de l’apprenant fort différente de celle qui est le plus souvent représentée dans la littérature sur la progression conceptuelle.

The Nature of Growth in Children’s Science Understandings: Insights from a Longitudinal Study

This paper uses selected data from a longitudinal study of fourteen young children, concerning their changing views of evaporation over a three year period, to argue that children’s science learning pathways are highly complex, fundamentally contextual and framed within a network of personal stories. It is argued that the longitudinal methodology opens up a more complex and nuanced view of children’s conceptual learning in school settings than is afforded by cohort studies, and that the focus on individuals over time forces a very different construction of the learner than is represented in mainstream conceptual change literature.