New Perspectives in Science Education

We report on video analysis of digitally supported teaching activities that were part of a three-year professional development (PD) programme on collaborative inquiry teaching of chemistry and physics in Swedish preschool (children one-five years). The PD programme involved all preschools in a school district in a mid-sized Swedish town encompassing both rural and central areas. A renewed national curriculum for preschool in Sweden 2011 instigated discussions about the need for preschool teachers to develop knowledge of both science content and favourable conditions for science teaching (cf. Thulin & Redfors 2017). To stimulate interest among the preschool teachers, chemistry and physics phenomena connected to everyday life were jointly chosen. A semantic view of theoretical models in science, with focus on their explanatory powers (Adúriz-Bravo 2012; Fridberg, et al. 2020) was adopted. Hence, the science teaching in the PD programme was set up to involve both an everyday phenomenon with chemistry or physics constituents, and a suitable theoretical explanatory model. Several studies (cf. Fridberg, Thulin, & Redfors 2018) suggest that students’ learning can be enhanced when they create digital representations of science phenomena. When choosing how to represent a phenomenon, students are challenged in their understanding of the involved explanatory model (Fridberg, Thulin, & Redfors 2018). The aim of the analysis reported on here was to develop knowledge about whether selected digital tools can be used during a teaching sequence to scaffold learning and contribute to children’s experiences of objects of learning in physics at different levels of abstraction. It was seen that abstract phenomena, with invisible processes, like the evaporation of water, introduced difficulties for the children. The children struggled in transforming between the real world and the artifacts in the slowmation animation. However, other phenomena did not induce the same difficulties with ‘moving’ between the real world and the slowmation model. This will be further discussed at the conference.

Keywords: Preschool, Early years physics, Theoretical models, Professional development.

References:

• Adúriz-Bravo, A. (2012). A ‘Semantic’ View of Scientific Models for Science Education. Science & Education, 22(7), 1593-1611.
• Fridberg, M., Thulin S., & Redfors, A. (2018). Preschool children’s Communication during Collaborative Learning of Water Phases Scaffolded by Tablets. Research in Science Education, 48(5), 1007-1026.
• Fridberg, M., Jonsson, A., Redfors, A., & Thulin S. (2019). Teaching Chemistry and Physics in Preschool – a Matter of Establishing Intersubjectivity. International Journal of Science Education 41(17), 2542-2556.
• Fridberg, M., Jonsson, A., Redfors, A., & Thulin S. (2020). The role of intermediary objects of learning in early years chemistry and physics. Early Childhood Education Journal 48(5), 585-595.
• Thulin, S. & Redfors, A. (2017). Student Preschool Teachers’ Experiences of Science and its Role in Preschool. Early Childhood Education Journal 45(4), 509-520.