Typical Didactical Activities in the Greek Early‐Years Science Classroom: Do they promote science learning?

This paper presents an epistemological analysis of typical didactical activities noted in early‐years science lessons, which was carried out in an attempt to diagnose the extent to which the teaching practices adopted by early‐years educators are successful in supporting young children’s understanding in science. The analysis of didactical activities used a framework that allowed us to discover whether they promoted desired connections between theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world. Theoretical ideas, evidence and the material world are entities internal to scientific inquiry and, in educational contexts, connections between them are considered essential in assisting the development of young children’s scientific thinking. The results indicated that in the early‐years science classroom scientific activity was mainly confined to the representational level. Intervention practices into the material world were limited, and were based on collected evidence. No interventions based on ideas were identified in the science lessons. Missing links between evidence and theory and between ideas and the material world suggest that the didactical activities analysed did not promote scientific understanding.     

History of Science and Instructional Design: The Case of Electromagnetism

Science &; Education - This paper deals with two main research questions: a) Can we search for pupils' potential alternative ideas in the history of science and especially in those areas...     

HOW STUDENT TEACHERS UNDERSTAND DISTANCE FORCE INTERACTIONS IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS

In this paper, we describe empirical research on the recording of primary school and preschool student teacher conceptions of the concept of distant force interactions in different contexts related to the school curriculum for this subject. For this objective to be achieved, we undertook ten semi-structured interviews with student teachers. Based on the findings from these interviews, we developed a written ten-item questionnaire that was distributed to 264 first-year student teachers at three Greek universities. The main findings of our research are that a significant number of students: (i) experience difficulty in recognizing the interactions in different contexts, and even in different cases within the same context; (ii) place the arrow representing the force on the body that exerts it and not on that which accepts it; and (iii) hold the alternative view that the larger the body interacting, the greater the force it exerts. Based on the above results, as well as in the ways in which they seem to be related, we developed hypotheses, potentially able to lead to the construction of a teaching–learning sequence, which focuses on the comprehension of force as the measure of a unified concept of interaction between two entities.     

Science and Theatre Education: A Cross-disciplinary Approach of Scientific Ideas Addressed to Student Teachers of Early Childhood Education

There is, in Greece, an ongoing attempt to breach the boundaries established between the different teaching-learning subjects of compulsory education. In this context, we are interested in exploring to what degree the teaching and learning of ideas from the sciences’ “internal life” (Hacking, in: Pickering (ed) Science as practice and culture, 1992) benefits from creatively coming into contact with theatrical education as part of the corresponding curriculum subject. To this end, 57 students of the Early Childhood Education Department of the University of Athens were called to study extracts from Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, to focus on a subject that the Dialogue’s “interlocutors” forcefully disagree about and to theatrically represent (using shadow theatre techniques) what they considered as being the central idea of this clash of opinions. The results indicate that this attempt leads to a satisfactory understanding of ideas relating to the content and methodology of the natural sciences. At the same time, theatrical education avails itself of the representation of scientific ideas and avoids the clichés and hackneyed techniques that the (often) simplistic choices available in the educational context of early childhood education tend towards. The basic reasons for both facets of this success are: (a) Genuine scientific texts force the students to approach them with seriousness, and all the more so if these recount the manner in which scientific ideas are produced and are embedded in the historical and social context of the age that created them; (b) The theatrical framework, which essentially guides the students’ activities, allows (if not obliges) them to approach scientific issues creatively; in other words, it allows them to create something related to science and recognize it as theirs; and, (c) Both the narrative texts describing processes of “science making” (Bruner, J Sci Educ Technol 1:5–12, 1992) and theatrical expression constitute fields that are characterized by what, for the students, is a common and understandable manner of expression: the narrative.