No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This article examines kindergarten children's (5-6 years old) engagement in scientific practices, with a focus on generating and using evidence to support claims, during a 5-month project about snails. The research questions are as follows: (1) what meanings do kindergarteners construct for what constitutes evidence? How are those meanings reflected in the development of data into evidence? (2) Which ways of gathering empirical evidence are jointly constructed by children and teacher during the project? (3) How do children use evidence to revise their understandings? The participants are one class of Early Childhood Education children (N ¼ 25) and their teacher. They were engaged in a project about snails, involving pursuing their own questions, carrying out experiments and purposeful observations, collecting data and drawing conclusions, under the guidance of the teacher. The results show that children developed meanings of a certain level of sophistication about evidence, that they distinguished between empirical evidence from planned experiments and from prolonged observation, which we call purposeful, and that they combined different types of evidence in the revision of their ideas about snails. We identified two levels in the development of data into evidence-closer to descriptive statements and evaluative judgments. We suggest that purposeful observation, which has a clear focus, is guided by the teacher and explicitly discussed, has affordances in early childhood science. For instance, 30 out of 57 evidence statements relate to purposeful observation. Promoting purposeful observation as a source of evidence at this age may allow studying processes both for children (biology processes) and for researchers (learning processes). The results would support Metz's (2011) contention about the relevance of instructional opportunities over developmental constraints.R esum e : Exam ınase a participaci on do alumnado de educaci on infantil (5-6 anos) nas pr acticas cient ıficas, en concreto en xerar e usar probas para sustentar conclusi ons, durante un proxecto de cinco meses sobre caracois. As preguntas de investigaci on son: (1) Que significados constr uen os nenos e nenas para o que constit uen probas? Como se reflicten estes significados no desenvolvemento de datos en probas? (2) Que formas de obter probas emp ıricas son constru ıdas conxuntamente por nenos e mestra durante o proxecto? e (3) Como usan os nenos e nenas as probas para revisar o seu coñecemento? Os participantes son unha clase de terceiro curso de Educaci on Infantil (N ¼ 25) e a s ua mestra. Levaron a cabo un proxecto sobre caracois, procurando respostas as suas propias preguntas, realizando experimentos e observaci ons cun prop osito, recollendo datos e extraendo conclusi ons, guiados pola mestra. Os resultados mostran que desenvolveron

How can we support pupils' engagement in argumentation? Should argumentation be explicitly taught or rather embedded in the learning tasks? Which design principles are related to the goal of promoting argumentation in the science classroom? Are they the same as design principles for constructivist learning environments? How can research explore these features of learning environments supporting argumentation?The above excerpt comes from a 4th-grade classroom (9-10-year-olds), during the process of jointly planning a field trip by teacher and pupils, including decisions about topics to be studied and methods to study them. The teacher uses an analogy between ecology and classroom studies that is the reverse of another analogy found in educational papers (see for instance Doyle, 1977) that propose viewing the classroom as a complex system of relationships and interactions similar to the relationships in ecosystems. Here the presence of the researcher, Ramón López, in the classroom is used to exemplify both the need for an approach to the pond as a whole and of doing it in the field. Implicit in the teacher analogy between the classroom and the pond is the goal of promoting pupils' reflection about their own learning processes and about the ways of constructing knowledge concerning the pond.The use of this analogy can be seen as connected to the third, fourth and fifth questions formulated in the first paragraph, the last concerning research about argumentation learning environments, a research tightly interwoven with the design principles aimed at promoting argumentation, the subject of the third and fourth questions. These design principles intend, among other goals, that pupils reflect about their own learning. The relationships among designing environments to promote argumentation and investigating them can be connected to the impact on some science educators, like myself, initiating S. Erduran and M. P. Jiménez-Aleixandre (eds.), Argumentation in Science Education.91