Abstract:

Still too often it is thought that children in preschool are not cognitively ready to address scientific issues. This idea comes from a conception of science as a transmission of content, which is very far from the constructivist idea of a competent and curious child, able to build his/her own knowledge.

The sky, for its presence in everyday life since early childhood, is a perfect field of experience for introducing young children to science. An effective approach to teach astronomy in preschool should entail direct contact with the sky and feature enough time to observe and make sense of the phenomena that occur there. It should be based on active and experiential learning and must take into account children’s ideas and previous experience.

In contribution we present a learning path on the day-night cycle that was implemented with 5-year-old children at a kindergarten in Italy, and we analyse the effects of the learning path on children’s conceptions and mental models. The specific topic was chosen since it has been indicated as a fundamental milestone for K-2 education by several national and international standards.

Individual interviews with all of the 21 children of the group were carried out at the beginning of the learning path, in order to gain insights on their ideas and explanations on the elements that would be covered during the learning path, and specifically: the Earth, its shape and relationship with the Sun, and the day-night cycle. The interviews contained both verbal questions and the request of a drawing of the Earth and the Sun. Following a pre/post-test design, both the interviews and the drawings were repeated one week after the conclusion of the learning path, in order to look for evidence of an evolution in children’s ideas.

The intervention featured 5 meetings of 1.5 hours each, working in parallel with two groups of 10-11 children each in order to ensure personal engagement, participation and enough time for discussion. The methodologies used during the intervention were narrative approaches, discourse, active observation and experimentation, graphical expressions (drawings and symbolic expression, individual and collective representations), the use of educational videos, the construction and use of tools, and kinaesthetic experiences. During the intervention, observations were performed and children’s artefacts were collected as additional sources of data for the evaluation of the learning path.

The results show evidence of a considerable evolution in both children’s ideas on the Earth, its shape and its relationship with the Sun, and the children’s explanations of the day-night cycle. Before the intervention, children mostly depicted the Earth as flat or using a synthetic (i.e. intermediate between intuitive and scientific) model, and the Sun was depicted in a very stereotypical way. At the end of the intervention almost all of the children depicted the Earth as spherical and in relationship with the Sun. Concerning the day-night cycle, children’s initial mental models were mainly classified as “initial” models (e.g. distance model, Sun movement, occlusion), while at the end most children had developed at least a synthetic model, and 5 children described a scientific model.

Keywords:

Early childhood, astronomy education, physics education, day-night cycle, mental models.