New Perspectives in Science Education

The goal of this scientific education interventions is to nurture, enrich and sustain children’s nature interest in scientific knowledge.

Scientific thinking can be characterized in terms of two principal features: i) contents and ii) processes, including formulation of hypotheses, design of experiments, observation, and evaluation of evidence (Klahr et al., 2011).

Given educators ambitions for science teaching, coupled with the competencies demonstrated by young children, it is important to consider the ways in which science instruction plays a role in guiding students to develop increasingly sophisticated understanding of science (Kittleson, 2011).

Junior Science (Costa, 2012), a strategy that it is being designed and implemented to prepare primary students to learn science, it is enchanting scholars. It intends to slowly involve them into the accurate space of the scientific thinking taking into account science as a practice that includes a structured body of concepts that can explain and predict observable facts, a way of thinking and a body of skills. These skills are specific and simultaneously universally essential to any intellectual sustainable development which is independent of the field of knowledge. The skills we are working on 6 years old children are: curiosity, attention, concentration, accuracy and resilience. The project desires to provide innovative didactic resources and to promote a teacher’s friendly alternative strategy to initiate students into the scientific concepts.

The main investigation question – At what extent the development of skills on 6 years old children such as - curiosity, attention, concentration, accuracy, resilience and team work, stimulate the learning process of the scientific methodology?

Context and Participants - We decided that classes of students submited to this project would have only 12 children. A 1^st grade classroom at an urban Female Private School, Colégio Horizonte, in Oporto, Portugal. The sample consists on eleven students, ten of them with 6 years at the present time and one being 5 years old.

References

Costa Flora, Pratas, H., Estrada, Rita (2012). Junior Science – Nurturing children’s natural interest in scientific knowledge. ARSA, Advanced Research in Scientific Areas, 1st Virtual International Conference, Slovakia.

Klahr D., Zimmerman C., Jirout J. (2011). Educational Interventions to Advance Children’s Scientific Thinking, Science, vol 333, pp. 971-975, 2011.

Kittleson J., (2011). “Epistemological beliefs of third-grade students in an investigation-rich classroom”, wileyonlinelibrary.com, 1026-1146.