Experimentation in primary school: discover and understand or verify what is expected?

Abstract

Science education in primary schools in Uruguay is still a pending task. Frequently, only biological science is taught in class. Often, activities are reduced either to look for information without experimentation, or to very guided hand-on activities with little space for actual research where results may differ from what is expected and new questions might come up. As a result, children have a partial and sometimes wrong concept of science. The idea of science as something distant from reality and ordinary life, holding absolute results and truth, is reinforced. A lot of research has been done in science didactics about the role of experimentation in order to improve scientific competences in the students. In this project we analyze the role of experimentation during the science class as well as the speech of the teacher in relation to his objectives and the planned didactic sequence. A qualitative methodology was used, through classroom observations and interviews with teachers. We chose a case study to inquire how the experiments are used in a science class and what is the role of experiments proposed by the teacher. To collect the data, recordings of classes were used and in-depth interviews were conducted with the teacher.