A teaching intervention for magnetism using STEM in kindergarten

Abstract

STEM education should begin in kindergarten, as pre-school children’s engagement with science and other fields, such as technology, raises their awareness and interest in science (Mantzicopoulos et al., 2009). In addition, it provides kindergarten children with the necessary opportunities to cultivate their talents (Chesloff, 2013) and contributes to their later development (Kermani& Aldemir, 2015). Pre-school children are capable and ready to learn with a STEM approach, as they can ask investigative questions, justify their opinions, and formulate interpretations about how the world around them works (NSF, 2012). Given the importance of the universal introduction of STEM in pre-school education, this work aims to design a teaching intervention in kindergarten using STEM on the topic of magnetism. First, reference is made to the use of STEM in kindergarten and the usual learning theories on which it is based. Then, the basic methods of its application are briefly presented. Furthermore, the theoretical framework regarding children’s misconceptions about magnetism is presented. Subsequently, the research questions are formulated on which the design of the educational intervention will be based, as well as the research hypotheses arising from the bibliographic review. Then, the goals of the teaching intervention are developed in harmony with the goals of the Greek curriculum for kindergarten, and the choice of methods, means, actions, and applications is justified. Finally, interdisciplinary activities using STEM and the involvement of new technologies are proposed.

Does Air Exist in Vases? Mental Representations of Children 4-6 Years Old

“…They are entities that the child begins to construct in his/her mind from birth as he/she lives and develops in the social and physical environment. In everyday life, the child formulates and reformulates a certain number of reasonings, solves relevant problems and gradually forms the phenomena and concepts studied in the natural sciences through the construction of representations (Jelinek, 2020;Ravanis, 1998;Samara & Kotsis, 2023). A prominent research area within this field is the study of children's mental representations of the natural phenomena and specifically the reasoning that is formulated based on these representations and their possible distance from school knowledge as it is constituted, at the qualitative level, in curricula.…”