Bugs,butterflies, and spiders: Children's understandings about insects

This article explores elementary children's ideas about insects. The study involved 20 children from each grade level, kindergarten through fifth-grade, for a total of 120 children. The data collection procedure was designed to investigate what an insect means to children, through the use of three different tasks: draw and explain, interview about instances, and the formulation of a general rule. Considering children's responses to the three tasks, I found that their ideas about insects reflect understandings based on physical characteristics of size and shape, arthropod characteristics, insect characteristics, human-insect interactions, life habits of insects, feeding habits of insects, and means of locomotion. Children's understandings are juxtaposed to that of a scientific perspective, elucidating implications for curriculum development and instructional practice.     

Four- to six-year-old children's conceptions of the mechanism of rainfall

The purpose of this study was to describe four- to six-year-old children's understandings of the mechanism of rainfall and to reveal possible differences due to age. A total of 22 children participated in the study (mean age = 60.4 months; range 48–73 months), including 14 boys and 8 girls, all from middle-SES families. To reveal children's understanding of the mechanism of rainfall, semi-structured interviews were conducted using a set of interview questions. Children were individually interviewed, and interviews were audio-taped and transcribed. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the transcribed audio tapes. A framework of codes was developed based on previous studies of children's understanding of the mechanism of rainfall. This partial framework of codes served as the basis for describing children's conceptual understandings of the mechanism of rainfall. A nonparametric statistical test was used to test for age differences in children's conceptions of the mechanism of rainfall. The results indicated that older preschool children were more likely to have synthetic or naturalistic conceptions than the younger children. Implications of the findings for instructional practices in early childhood classrooms are discussed.     

Harry Potter and “the landscape of consciousness”: repeat home viewers’ understandings about character

Many children view favourite feature films repeatedly at home and develop understandings of them. This article discusses findings from a study which focused on the understandings that 9‐ and 10‐year‐old children showed about character in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. These findings are reported in terms of a framework appropriate for responses to character in literature or in film. The children's home‐based engagement with characters provides evidence for teachers who are planning to extend understandings about character in their classrooms. The article shows that children's interpretative and structural engagement can build significant understandings and informed appreciation which are similar to those that teachers aim for.     

Young Children'S Notations For Fractions

This paper focuses on the kinds of notations young children make for fractional numbers. The extant literature in the area of fractional numbers acknowledges children's difficulties in conceptualizing fractional numbers. Some of the research suggests possibly delaying an introduction to conventional notations for algorithms and fractions until children have developed a better understanding of fractional numbers (e.g., Hunting, 1987; Sáenz-Ludlow, 1994, 1995). Other research (e.g., Empson, 1999), however, acknowledges the interaction between conceptual understandings and the representations for those understandings. Following the latter line of thinking, this paper argues that children's notational competencies and conceptual understandings are intertwined, addressing the following research questions: (a) What kinds of notations do five and six-year-old children make for fractional numbers?; and (b) What can be learned about young children's learning of fractional numbers by analyzing the notations they make? This paper presents data from interviews carried out with twenty-four children in Kindergarten and first grade (five and six-year-old children), exploring the nuances of their notations and the meanings that they attach to fractions.     

Nature as children's space: A systematic review

The emerging interest in “spaces of childhood” over the past two decades can be identified across numerous disciplines. A substantial body of research has indicated that children's active engagement within the natural environment is associated with a range of cognitive, physical, affective, and moral developmental benefits. Although research on children's space and place is a burgeoning field, currently only one identified systematic review exists within the literature investigating the benefits of children's engagement in nature. The aim of this article was thus to systematically review and synthesize the findings of children's understandings and engagement with nature as a space. After a systematic search of the literature, 83 articles were included in this review with study samples spanning across children aged 3 to 18 years old. The review underscores four thematic domains derived utilizing thematic analysis. It is ostensible from the results that children's perceptions of and engagement in nature as a space and place are multifarious, benefiting children's well-being in myriad ways. At a foundational level, more research is required to deepen understandings about how children in differing contexts construct nature.     

The Wheels of the Bus: Children designing in an early years classroom

Many claims have been made for the value of design in the school curriculum. This case study, of young children's designs in an early years design, make and appraise (DMA) classroom, examined several issues related to these claims, including the connection between designing and making, the purpose of drawing for young children, children's understandings about the design process, types of images used by young children and children's attitudes to designing. The role of the teacher in the children's understanding of the design / drawing process was explored. The study revealed that design for young children is a complex topic requiring a range of sophisticated teaching and learning strategies.     

Children's understandings of home-school relations

There is a consensus that close home-school links are beneficial for children's education. However, there is a silence about any part that children may play in, and their views on, this process. This paper reports on research in schools with diverse social intakes, looking at children's understandings and experience of home-school relations. Those in inner city schools were far more likely to talk about separation between their home and school lives, as were working class and ethnic minority children generally, as well as older children. However, all the children expressed strong views about the privacy of their home life in relation to schools and teachers.     

The role of children's journals in elementary school science activities

Abstract: This article reports on a study that investigated the ways that children's use of science journals aided their acquisition of science understandings in one kindergarten and one fourth‐grade classroom. The questions for investigation were: how does the child contextualize the science experience on the journal page? How do child‐produced graphics on the journal page reflect the children's experiences with other school texts? The study found that children recontextualized their understandings of the science investigation and phenomena by using three types of mental contexts that were reflected in their science journals: these contexts were imaginary, experienced, and investigative worlds. By drawing on these three worlds or internal contexts, the children were able to pull the external phenomenon into an internal context that was familiar to them. The child's construction of ideas about a current science experience as expressed on the journal page may reflect experiences with other conventional texts. In this study the children's representations of their imaginary, experienced and/or investigative worlds were shaped by other texts and structures such as school science texts. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 43–69, 2001     

Developing a play‐based communication assessment through collaborative action research with teachers in northern Canadian indigenous communities

With the goal of developing culturally appropriate approaches for assessing and supporting children's language use, teachers of 4‐to 6‐year‐old children in northern Canadian rural and Indigenous communities are involved in a 6‐year collaborative action research project. Teachers video record children's interactions during dramatic and construction play and then meet with university researchers to carry out inductive analyses of ways in which children use language to achieve social purposes. From these analyses, a Play‐based Communication Assessment has been created. Examples from two teachers' classrooms in one Indigenous community are used to show how play contexts and the still‐evolving play‐based communication assessment provide opportunities for teachers to recognise and build upon the linguistic and cultural resources that children bring to classrooms. Through the play‐based assessment and action research processes, teachers have come to recognise the richness of children's language when they are engaged in play and have gained understandings of their community's culture. Teachers and researchers are exploring ways to capture children's non‐verbal communication abilities through this assessment approach.     

A Typology of Parental Involvement in Education Centring on Children and Young People: Negotiating familialisation,institutionalisation and individualisation

This article explores the widespread emphasis on parental involvement in education from the perspectives of children and young people. In contrast to the conceptualisation of children as variable social actors, policy initiatives to link home and school more effectively, and research-generated typologies of parental involvement, unthinkingly familialise and institutionalise children by ignoring any part they may play in parental involvement in their education. Drawing on data from our study of children's understandings of home-school relations, we develop and elaborate a typology that centres on the complex ways that children and young people talk about creating, acceding to, and resisting their parents' involvement in their education. The socially patterned differences between the children and young people's understandings and experiences demonstrate how the broad social processes of familialisation, institutionalisation and individualisation are, in fact, concretely lived and negotiated in variable ways. Nevertheless, there are also some commonalities in children and young people's resistance around notions of privacy.     

Comparing children's and student teachers’ ideas about science concepts

Children and teachers may not think in the same way about particular science concepts. Such parallel lines of thought can compound children's confusion and misunderstanding as they learn science at primary school. The situation could be more acute when student teachers are teaching science, because of their limited experience of considering children's ideas. This paper investigates children's and student teachers’ ideas about certain science concepts: ‘animal’, ‘flower’, ‘living’, ‘force’ and ‘energy’. The ideas and understandings of 96 children and 168 student teachers were explored. Results showed that the student teachers and children had similar ideas about ‘flower’ and ‘animal’, whereas they evidenced very different responses to ‘living’, ‘energy’ and ‘force’. Implications for classroom practice are considered.     

Mindful hands,gestures as language: listening to children

This paper explores ideas of language as a cognitive tool and the role of gesture in expressing children's interests and levels of knowledge. The context is a group of three‐year‐old children who participate in a weekly music session with a trained musician. The authors present drawings from photographs of children's hands and interpret them, using contextual information, to explain how the positioning of the children's hands reflects their internalized understandings and can be viewed as a rich symbolic language. A discussion of the early childhood curriculum and the use of finger plays has been included to suggest that gesture was initially viewed as part of ‘the whole child’ but, today, activities like finger plays have become ritualized exercises. It is suggested that if adults do not listen to the language of hands they are depriving themselves of a valuable window into children's thinking and learning.     

“Ah,I know why…”: children developing understandings through engaging with a picture book

This article describes part of a study that explored the responses of nine‐ and ten‐year‐old children during a picturebook read aloud in a small group setting in a New Zealand classroom. The read aloud was interactive, where the participants were encouraged to respond to the book and to each other throughout the session. The authors created a framework for analysing the responses, adapting the model of Lawrence Sipe (2008) with its five categories of literary understanding, by expanding on the analytical category to enable a finer analysis of the responses. This article discusses the children's depth of thinking and the understandings they developed as they engaged with the read aloud. It also describes how the adapted framework allowed a closer analysis of these understandings, including the way the elements of art used in the illustrations contributed to the children's ideas. The findings suggest ways picturebooks can be used to promote children's thinking and how teachers can guide discussion about a complex text. Implications for use of the framework in further research are discussed.     

Young People's Conceptions of Environment: A phenomenographic analysis

Environmental education in schools is an important strategy in achieving environmental improvement. However, it needs to be based on children's understandings of environment rather than on assumptions of what children know and believe. This paper reports on a research project where school children's answers to a question 'I think the term/word environment means ' were analysed using the qualitative research method of phenomenography. Six distinct conceptions were isolated, ranging from the least sophisticated--environment as a place--to the most inclusive and expansive--environment and people in a relationship of mutual sustainability. An important qualitative difference was found between conceptions that treat the environment as an object and relational conceptions. The implications of these findings for environmental education are discussed.     

Constructing Understandings through Play in the Early Years

This article explores the role of play in one specific area of cognitive development. It is suggested that children's engagement in shared pretend play promotes the development of a representational theory of mind in at least two ways: through generating a sense of cognitive conflict as children encounter views and ideas that contrast with their own understandings (a Piagetian perspective) and through the construction of understandings that come from interacting in a social context and engaging in the shared construction of knowledge (a Vygotskian perspective). The compatibility of Piagetian and Vygotskian approaches is discussed.

The article reports an investigation of the shared pretense of four‐year‐old children. This study involved two groups of children, one of which participated in a program aimed at increasing the complexity of the shared pretense in which children engaged and one group who did not participate in these experiences. From this study, the significance of complex shared pretense and the relationship of this to children's developing understandings of mind is discussed.     

An investigation into the role that school-based interactive science centres may play in the education of primary-aged children

The recent development of interactive science centres throughout Britain has provided schools with a potential resource to help provide the science curriculum. This paper explores the role that a schoolbased 'mini-museum', designed to mimic an interactive science centre, may play in young children's science education. The research investigates children's interactions with exhibits and each other in such a 'centre', and suggests that although children did appear to make some gains in their learning of scientific knowledge and scientific skills and processes, the largest gains were made in the development of positive attitudes towards science. This positive attitude towards science provides the classroom teacher with opportunities to build upon the children's new-found enthusiasm and to ensure that they make lasting gains from their interactive experience.     

Of butterflies and beetles: First graders' ways of seeing and talking about insect life cycles

First graders' understandings of insect life cycles are explored through pre- and postinstructional interviews, as well as through the analysis of children's journal entries and talk that occurred throughout an instructional unit on beetle and butterfly metamorphosis. The data indicated that children's informal experiences resulted in the construction of one of three models of insect life cycles. Children's journal writing provided an avenue for contextualizing their experience with beetle and butterfly metamorphosis. Although the children's ways of seeing and talking about beetle and butterfly life cycles were changed by the instructional experience, the instructional experience constrained their understandings of insect life cycles. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 873–889, 1997.     

Drama activities as ideational resources for primary‐grade children in urban science classrooms

In this study we explored how dramatic enactments of scientific phenomena and concepts mediate children's learning of scientific meanings along material, social, and representational dimensions. These drama activities were part of two integrated science‐literacy units, Matter and Forest, which we developed and implemented in six urban primary‐school (grades 1st–3rd) classrooms. We examine and discuss the possibilities and challenges that arise as children and teachers engaged in scientific knowing through such experiences. We use Halliday's (1978. Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press) three metafunctions of communicative activity—ideational, interpersonal, and textual—to map out the place of the multimodal drama genre in elementary urban school science classrooms of young children. As the children talked, moved, gestured, and positioned themselves in space, they constructed and shared meanings with their peers and their teachers as they enacted their roles. Through their bodies they negotiated ambiguity and re‐articulated understandings, thus marking this embodied meaning making as a powerful way to engage with science. Furthermore, children's whole bodies became central, explicit tools used to accomplish the goal of representing this imaginary scientific world, as their teachers helped them differentiate it from the real world of the model they were enacting. Their bodies operated on multiple mediated levels: as material objects that moved through space, as social objects that negotiated classroom relationships and rules, and as metaphorical entities that stood for water molecules in different states of matter or for plants, animals, or non‐living entities in a forest food web. Children simultaneously negotiated meanings across all of these levels, and in doing so, acted out improvisational drama as they thought and talked science. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 302–325, 2010     

Children’s friendships in diverse primary schools: teachers and the processes of policy enactment

Abstract

Drawing on data from a project exploring children's and adults’ friendships across social class and ethnic difference, this paper focuses on the enactment of national and institutional policy around children’s friendships as realized in three primary schools in diverse urban areas in London. Through a focus on the way in which social and emotional learning (SEL) and teachers’ understandings of children’s friendships seek to govern children’s friendship behaviours, we turn to Foucault’s work to explore how power shapes relations between policy frameworks and teachers’ practices, and between those who teach and those who are taught. We discuss the disciplinary potential of SEL and teachers’ ‘common sense’ understandings of children’s friendships, but conclude by noting possibilities for teachers to create spaces in which all children can safely explore the nature of friendships.