On The Formation Of Children 's Scientific Concept

From the 1920 s, psychological researchers focus on child concept formation; gradually become an important topic in many disciplines such as epistemology, psychology, learning science and science education.The thesis explores the formation of scientif ic concepts from prescientif ic concept of children’s perspective. Children’s preconceptions are their achievement of understanding the world and things around them; they also are children’s original understanding of scientific concepts. Prescientific concept of the child exists prior to a particular content of education.These are the achievement of perceiving the world and the everyday things around the child, these are the original state of scientific concepts for children. Prescientific concept of the child established foundation to construct basic science concept, they are also the key factors to achieve conceptual change.There is a solid theoretical foundation to research scientif ic concepts of children. In Children philosophy, constructivism, phenomenology, they explain children are born learners and philosophers, have their own life and the original perception of the world, the construction of a new concept on the basis of existing experience and knowledge. In learning science, cognitive psychology, science epistemology, they hold that concepts formation of children is a process of conceptual change, but also from the concrete to the abstract.In the children’s age range is larger and there are many science education concepts.Therefore, I need to limit the research object and research content. I choosed children 3-6 years of age,because they didn’t receive formal science education,they could demonstrate truly their understanding.According to the requirements of science education curriculum, I chose water, light and shadow, air, life, useing clinical interviews and educational phenomenological research methods, describing and structuring the original understanding of things from children.In the topic structured refining data process,I divided the children’s scientific concept formation into four levels from two dimensions:fact,concept,principle,theory.Every level may be misconceptions, inc omplete understanding and correct concepts. Based on these work, I generalized four basic characteristics about children’s scientific concept formation: there are "dependent" and "broken" relationship between the experience and the children’s scientific concept formation, the concepts have been established may mix with right and error, the process of forming concepts would be effected by multiple factors, there are significant individual differences in different children. Children unfolded or iginal understanding, further illustrating children 3-6 years of age is not just animists; they have formed some objective knowledge and ideas about their liv ing world.From prescientific concept to scientif ic concepts is the basic process of the concept formation for children. Educators must first understand the level and the state of concept formation, more importantly, they need to know how to use these original understanding to promote the formation of scientific concepts.For promoting the formation of scientif ic concepts, we need return to the practice of science education. Then how to promote the formation of scientific concepts for children? In this study, starting from the fourth chapter, I went into the field of science education investigating the current practice of science education in order to identify problems and conduct empir ical research, try to put forward countermeasures and suggestions to promote the formation of scientif ic concepts for children.On the basis of field observations, the author listed five key problems. First, ignoring the children constructing scientific concept deeply; Second, there is a gap between children’s real development of scientific concept and the teaching; Third, the science teachers’ scientif ic literacy is not optimistic(exist informative error, neglect of children misconceptions); Fourth, science teachers are lack of the ability to des ign and organize scientif ic inquiry activities; Fifth, lack of logic and gradual progress among the scientific curriculum. These problems have seriously affected the formation of scientif ic concepts for children, hindering the promotion of their scientif ic literacy.In the way of teaching improvement repeatedly, focusing on how to change children’s misconceptions to scientific concepts, some teachers and I endeavored to do some practice and explorement, first is to turn teachers views from ignoring to pay attention the preconceptions; Secondly is to lead to cognitive conflict by conceptual change; thirdly is to provide cognitive scaffolding by using the theory of constructivism learning.Based on the problems that are not conducive to the concept formation of children and practice we did, I advanced some suggestions on effectively promoting the children’s scientific concept formation. The main suggestions focus on teachers, curriculum and teaching. On the scientific curriculum, we should organize the contents centering on scientific key concepts and design the scientific contents progressively. On the science teaching, we should rationalize the relationship between inquiry and concept learning, use a variety of teaching strategies flexibly and pay attention to interdisciplinary teaching. These attempts will provide reference to children’s science education reform. Meanwhile, the way of science education for children aged 3-6 is diverse, it should take into account the characteristics of physical and mental development of children, especially the "animism" tendency,we should promote the use of fairy tales, games, and other non-rational way of preaching. In addition, with a broad-based scientific content, we should involve multi-disciplinary content, such as mathematics, engineering, technology, art, emphasize on interdisciplinary teaching which the current mainstream of international science education is.