A process approach to children's understanding of scientific concepts: A longitudinal case study
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 dynamicsthe boy's and the researcher's fluctuations in complexity levelsduring 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 variabilityexploratory 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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