Abstract:

Children’s learning processes are complex and they need to be analysed in order to adapt the pedagogical interventions. The present research focuses on a case study based on the observance of the learning processes of children between 3 and 5 years old when they explore the possibilities offered by a science proposal based on the use of scales as tools to discover basic weight notions. These observations took place in the Lab 0_6: Discovery, Research and Documentation Centre for Science Education in Early Childhood, a science space created by the Faculty of Social Sciences in Manresa (UVic-UCC), which aims to strengthen the children’s learning process through open, motivating and challenging proposals.

The children’s science learning processes can be analysed through different phases defined by various authors such as Osborne (2014), Pujol (2003) and Sanmartí (2004) and Pedreira (2016). In this study, three main phases in children’s science learning process have been considered, according to Pedreira (2016); the Experience with reality (the contact with the world), the Explicitation of ideas (expressing ideas/notions about facts, materials…) and the knowledge Evolution (the change of these ideas/notions through interaction and new experiences).

The children’s learning processes, in this case study, will be observed in natural situations. To analyse the data, an inductive-deductive method, based on literature and specific categories, has been followed; the aforementioned categories were defined by experts and adapted by the author according to the experimental observations.

Once the observations were gathered and analysed, the results showed that the Experience phase was predominant in children, followed by the Explicitation phase, although the latter appeared in the oldest group with higher frequency. The Evolution of ideas phase rarely appeared as it seems that longer experimentation time and more intense situations of interaction and reflection would be required. In addition, some actions related to the use of instruments that did not correspond with their common usage were observed. Finally, some improvements were suggested in order to achieve the objectives of the proposal.

Keywords:

Learning, science space, nursery education, weight scales.