Discussing the Greenhouse Effect: children's collaborative discourse reasoning and conceptual change

In environmental education the construction of appropriate knowledge is not enough, but is undoubtedly a fundamental component of individual and collective environmental responsiveness. The aim of this study was to investigate fifth graders' changes of conceptions about the greenhouse effect and global warming, due to socio‐cognitive interaction developed in small and large group discussions in an authentic classroom context during the implementation of an environmental education curriculum unit. We hypothesized that a classroom transformed into a community of discoursei.e. a learning environment which stimidates and supports giving verbal explanations, comparing and critically evaluating different points of view on the examined environmental phenomenon, would be a fruitful breeding ground for knowledge revision. The results show that classroom discussions, the core of the proposed learning activity, led the children, although at different levels, to the integration of new scientific knowledge into their conceptual ecology, based on the personal revision of pre‐instructional conceptions. As hypothesized, a high positive correlation was found between conceptual change and metaconceptual awareness of the changes in pre‐existing representations of the examined phenomenon. Some implications are drawn from the standpoint of environmental education.