A process approach to children's understanding of scientific concepts: A longitudinal case study

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2013.12.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We use a microgenetic method to study changes in the complexity of understanding.

  • Variability in complexity levels seemed not to be clustered in specific parts of the interaction.

  • The boy's frequencies of the different complexity levels shifted over time.

  • In/decreases in the researcher's complexity levels were related to those of the boy.

  • In next sessions, the student initiated significantly more simultaneous in/decreases.

Abstract

In order to optimally study changes in the complexity of understanding, microgenetic measures are needed, and a coupling of these to longer-term measures. We focus on the interaction dynamics between a 4-year old boy and a researcher while they work on tasks about air pressure in three subsequent sessions. The complexity of the utterances of the researcher (questions) and the boy (answers) was measured using a skill theory-based scale. Over the course of the three sessions, an increase in the boy's number of right answers occurred, and the frequencies of the complexity levels shifted. With regard to the interaction dynamics, the boy initiated significantly more simultaneous in- and decreases in complexity level over time, whereas the researcher initiated less. At the same time, the boy showed an increase in his mean understanding level. Therefore, on the longer term, learning may be related to taking more responsibility for generating lines of thought.

Section snippets

Defining scientific understanding

Multiple studies on scientific learning show that students develop various concepts about scientific phenomena during their (early) school years (Linn and Eylon, 2006, Zimmerman, 2005). These scientific concepts can be defined as ideas about phenomena in the domains of chemistry, physics, and biology (Baartman and Gravemeijer, 2011, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Program for International Student Assessment, 2003). Children use these concepts in combination with

Using dynamic skill theory to take microgenetic measures of understanding

In many microgenetic studies, researchers choose to code and analyze video-data, to prevent disrupting the unfolding process as much as possible. Skill theory (Fischer, 1980, Fischer and Bidell, 2006) includes a scale that provides a useful tool for coding such data. Skill theory focuses on the complexity and variability of children's skills, which consist of actions and thinking abilities, embodied in verbal and non-verbal behavior. Used in a microgenetical way, the scale enables researchers

Structured intra-individual variability

Intra-individual variability is crucial to understand developmental phenomena (Siegler, 1994), given that development is by definition a real-time iterative process within individuals (Van Orden et al., 2003). Information about fluctuations in people's actions or thinking can thus help to describe and understand cognitive change (Siegler, 2007). From a dynamic point of view, variability is seen as a system-specific property (Steenbeek et al., 2012, Van Geert and Steenbeek, 2005a), meaning that

Child–context dynamics

Most studies do not specifically address the continuous intertwining of person and context (Richardson, Marsh, & Schmidt, 2010), but instead view the environment as “system input” (p. 5), that is, an independent variable that influences the person, or interacts with certain characteristics of the person. Viewed dynamically, however, behavior is a “dynamic, self-organized consequence of the physical laws and informational constraints that are mutually structured across mind, body, and

A case study — research questions and hypotheses

This case study is focused on a typically developing 4-year old boy, who worked together with a researcher on a task about air pressure during three visits. Skill theory was used to code the cognitive complexity of the boy's answers and the researcher's questions. The central research question was: How can we characterize the interaction dynamicssingle bondthe boy's and the researcher's fluctuations in complexity levelssingle bondduring one session, and how does this change over the course of three sessions? To

Participant information

For this study, a typically developing boy (4 years and 8 months old) was chosen as a case. He attended kindergarten at a primary school in the north of the Netherlands, and his scores on early arithmetic and language tests (measured in the Cito national ongoing assessment program) fell within the range of the 25% highest-scoring 4-year olds.

Material

The boy worked on a hands-on air pressure task, while the researcher asked about the functioning of the task, and provided adaptive scaffolding. During the

Microgenetical variabilitysingle bondexploratory analyses

During session 1, the boy more often responded with false and correct yes/no answers to close ended-questions compared to the other levels. In addition, answers on levels 3 and 4 were more often observed, whereas he almost never answered on levels 1 and 2 (see Table 1). Most frequencies, however, were not significantly higher or lower than expected based on the total number of answers in that session, apart from the low frequencies of level 1 and 2 answers. From a visual inspection of Fig. 1 it

Discussion

With this study, we showed how the development of understanding can be studied using a microgenetic method. In terms of the in-depth characteristics of learning distinguished by Flynn and Siegler, (2007) and Siegler (2006), this case study investigated the path (changes in understanding), and variability of understanding scientific tasks about air pressure. We focused not only on the understanding process of the boy, but also on the complexity of the questions asked by the interaction partner

Acknowledgments

The authors like to thank Ruud Den Hartigh and two anonymous reviewers for their critical reading of the manuscript.

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