APTITUDES TOWARDS SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTATION IN FOURTH GRADE STUDENTS IN A LUDIC ENVIRONMENT IN THE ENGLISH CLASS

This paper is frameworked in a general proposal research called: “propuesta multidisciplinaria para el desarrollo de la creatividad y el aprendizaje lúdico de la ciencia y la tecnología en el segundo ciclo de la educación básica en Bogotá” (PMDLALCTSCEBB) conducted by the researching group Calidad y Saberes attached to the researching center of distrital university Francisco José de Caldas (CIUD) in Bogotá, Colombia and directed by the professor Nancy Gómez Bonilla.

Thus, “aptitudes towards scientific experimentation in fourth grade students in an interactive environment in the English class “arises as a contribution to the general research mentioned before. The pedagogical intervention is being carried out at Manuel Cepeda Vargas School, located in Bogotá; the importance of this project is the central theme from which this research lies; it means it takes into account the aptitudes in fourth grade students within the active teaching method applied in the field of scientific experimentation; all these focused on comprehending the way in which those aptitudes are manifested through the development of the English class as a second language.

The central topic of this project in founded on some phenomena that has been found through our teaching experience such as; lack of interactive activities understood in many of the times as a no learning process besides of the non-application of multidisciplinary natural sciences contents in the classroom. It could be observed as well a theoretical and lineal instruction, letting aside the experimentation, also, the methodologies that have been proposed by the new school that at the same time includes the active teaching method whose principle is the manipulation, experimentation, invention and discovery.

The type of research that is being used is located within the mixed research paradigm. It is also descriptive and longitudinal since it is working one year ago (students were in third grade last year now they are in fourth grade) whose data collection method belongs to a quasi-experimental conduction. Then, data have been collected by aptitudes test, photographs, videos, field notes, and experiment journals. Monitoring a control group and an experimental group.

Regarding the implications of this project is important to say that English and science teachers work together and propitiate interactive learning environments, where one of the characteristics of the role of students is to manipulate the materials; it means, they do not observe the experiment but they participate in it.