Children's understanding of the earth's shape: an instructional approach in early education (original) (raw)
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Research findings in the field of early childhood education have supported the view that young children are capable of approaching the natural world in a systematic way. The present paper presents a pilot study on the construction of a precursor model concerning the earth's shape through a series of activities during which children are using two-dimensional and three-dimensional tools of representation of the earth (the map and the globe). Three educators and 73 children participated in the teaching intervention during which children had to exchange ideas concerning what is represented, follow the route of a hero on the map and the globe and argue about similarities and differences between the map and the globe.
Review of Science, Mathematics and ICT Education, 2009
A semi-structured interview was individually administered to 76 preschoolers. The interview raised questions about the conceptual understanding of certain geophysical entities. A teaching intervention designed to attempt an understanding of the relationship between them and earth's surface was implemented with groups of 5-9 children in order to help children construct a more “realistic” model of earth. The intervention's effectiveness was consequently evaluated (after two weeks) using an interview similar to that conducted ...
The purpose of this study is to explore primary school children's understandings about the shape of the Earth. The sample is consisted of 124 first-graders from five primary schools located in an urban city of Turkey. The data of the study were collected through children's drawings and semi-structured interviews. Results obtained from the drawings showed that only one third of the participants have drawn scientifically acceptable images of the earth. However, the subsequent semi-structured interviews revealed that more children have scientific knowledge about the shape of the Earth. The results also revealed that cartoons, story books and daily life experiences are the reasons for children's misconceptions.
Learning and Instruction, 2005
This experiment investigated the effect of the presentation of a globe e the culturally accepted artifact representing the earth e on children's reasoning in elementary astronomy. Forty-four children from grades 1 and 3 were interviewed individually. First, the children were asked to make their own representations of the earth (i.e., drawings and play-dough models) and to indicate where people live on the earth. Then, the same children were presented with the globe and were asked to answer another set of questions regarding the shape of the earth and the areas where people live. The results showed an increase in the frequency of correct responses with the presentation of the globe, but also a decrease in the overall consistency of responses. Only some (the older) children could profit from the presence of the artifact to construct an internally consistent scientific model of the earth. Many children employed a mixed way of responding, sometimes basing their answers on the externally provided model and sometimes on their prior knowledge. These latter children did not seem to be aware of what they were doing. It appears that in the absence of an external, cultural model, children can form internal representations which they can distort in ways that make them consistent with their prior knowledge. But, when the cultural artifact is Learning and Instruction 15 (2005) 333e351 www.elsevier.com/locate/learninstruc present, such distortions are not possible with the result that children end up with internally inconsistent patterns of responses.
The Concept of the Earth's Shape: A Study of Conceptual Change in Childhood
This paper presents the results of an experiment which investigated elementary school children's concept of the earth's shape and the related concept of gravity. First, third, and fifth grade children were asked a series of factual, explanatory, and generative questions in an attempt to understand as clearly as possible the way they conceptualized the shape of the earth. An examination of the responses of individual children to these questions revealed considerable surface inconsistency. For example, many children said that the earth is round but at the same time stated that it has an edge and that people could fall down from that edge. A great deal of this apparent inconsistency could be explained by assuming that the children had formed and used in a consistent fashion various assimilatory concepts of the earth's shape, for example, that the earth is a disc, that there are two earths, one round and one flat, and that the earth is a sphere but people live on flat ground inside the sphere. We argue that children construct these assimilatory concepts in an effort to reconcile the information coming from adults that the earth is a sphere with a naive concept of a flat earth. We further interpret the presence of assimilatory models to support the hypothesis that children's concept of the earth is embedded within certain naive ontological and epistemological theories and that changing this concept requires a change of theory analogous in many respects to theory change in the history of science.
Is the world round or flat? Children's understanding of the earth
Investigation of children's understanding of the earth provides important insights into the origins of children's knowledge, the structure of their concepts, and the development of scientific ideas. proposed that, under the influence of intuitive constraints and observations, children form naı¨ve but coherent mental models of the earth: for example they believe it to be flat, or that we live inside a hollow sphere. To test this claim, 59 children aged 6 -8 years and 33 adults were given multiple-choice questions and a 3D model selection task. This approach avoided the criticisms of recent studies by providing participants with a full range of possible answers. Even the youngest children preferred scientific responses and so demonstrated some knowledge of the earth. Only 10% of the children showed any evidence of naı¨ve mental models; other participants who gave non-scientific answers were inconsistent and unsystematic. It is argued that intuitive constraints have little or no influence on the development of children's ideas in this domain, and that emerging knowledge of the earth progresses from being fragmented to consistently scientific.