New Perspectives in Science Education

Doing science is a natural part of children learning to explore their curiosity about the natural world. In early science exploration, children gradually develop their science skills for exploring and drawing conclusions of the natural world from their experiences. There are eight basic science process skills that children should use in their explorations, which are; observing, classifying, measuring, using numbers, communicating, using space/time relationships, inferring, and predicting. There have been numerous research studies about how children develop science process skills, but rarely research done about how children use these skills. Most of the instruments used for exploring science process skills are multiple choice and written tests, which are not suitable for children, especially in early childhood. This study presents the invention of an instrument for exploring children’s basic science process skills using interview about events with children for familiar objects and events such as jelly bears and drinks. The children were asked to use their science process skills to complete each task step by step and the interviewer recorded the children’s behavior, dialogues, and collected their writing and drawings.  This instrument was used with 30 children from Kindergarten 2 to Grade 4 (ages 6 to 10).  The results suggested that the instrument could be used for exploring children’s basic science process skills at all ages. The results of the children’s science process skills indicated that children develop some science process skills when they get older, but some do not.  The results of each of the skills were that children: 1) usually use only eyes as one sense when observing objects, 2) usually use more than one criteria to group the objects, 3) at an early age could not use any basic measuring instrument, 4) can count and order the numbers correctly, 5) can communicate their results using drawings, 6) can draw a 2D image of a 3D object and communicate about the geometrical shapes, but not the form of the objects, 7) cannot make an inference from the evidence in that they could only explain what they observed but could not draw a conclusion, 8) can make predictions based on evidence they observed.

Keywords: Children; Interview about Events; Science Process Skills.

References:

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