Redleaf Press interviewed Ingrid Chalufour and Karen Worth, authors of the Young Scientists Series, about using scientific inquiry with young children to develop scientific ways of thinking. We found out that early science education can have the added benefit of enhancing math and literacy skills too.

Redleaf Press (RP): The Young Scientist Series is geared for preschoolers. What kind of scientific understanding can you expect from this age group and how do you respond to questions that ask, Should we start science in preschool?

Karen Worth

Karen Worth (KW): By introducing preschool kids to science and inquiry into phenomena, we build a wonderful basis or foundation of experience in both the physical world and in thinking about that world for years to come. Science in early childhood allows children a chance to develop the beginnings of scientific reasoning, and it exposes them to some experiences that have at their core basic concepts of science. I also think science is wonderful for this age because it is so motivating. Kids love this kind of exploration because it is about the world around them and because the phenomena are intrinsically interesting. Children want to make sense of things. We are taking advantage of that and using science as a way to support the development of many other areas as well, whether it's verbal, social, physical, or cognitive. Science provides a context for some of the other areas we think are important for kids.

Ingrid Chalufour

Ingrid Chalufour (IC): We know that young children are capable of developing conceptual understanding in science and we also know that without guidance there is something incomplete about the learning experience, which leads to rather unsophisticated conceptual understandings or naive theories about the world. But when they have the guidance of a teacher who really focuses their exploration on particular phenomena or concepts over time, they come to a more sophisticated understanding. We know that children are capable of doing that, so why not give them that opportunity?

KW: When people ask that question, is preschool too young for science, they often have a vision or view of science teaching that is quite different from ours. They see science as a period during the day in which we teach children certain facts— that insects have six legs, that plants have stems, leaves, roots, and flowers, etc. Their image of science is mainly information and the process by which it is learned is what we would call "activity based"—we will do a bunch of activities with plants, learn the names of the parts, and we'll end up with marigolds for Mother's Day. Our view is that science is a guided and facilitated exploration over time in which children are introduced to science as inquiry into interesting and conceptually rigorous phenomena.

RP: You talk about science as inquiry. What is inquiry-based science, and can you explain the elements of open exploration versus focused exploration that you describe in your books?

KW: The perspective that we take on the nature of scientific inquiry, whether for three-year-olds or sixty-five-year-olds, is that scientific inquiry is a process—a messy one—ut a process that begins with direct interaction with a phenomenon. This open-ended exploration allows the explorer, or the investigator, a chance to experience the phenomenon, to raise questions about it, to wonder about it, and to just become grounded in it. If you think of water, which is an easy example to think about, just experiencing water in a variety of different ways, especially in the context of relatively carefully selected materials, is likely to raise questions about water, focus attention on interesting properties of water, and encourage some new ideas about liquids. This is what scientists do when they explore something new.

The next phase is to choose and develop some questions or ideas about the phenomena. As a group or individually, kids are guided towards choosing something they are wondering about, asking some specific questions, and making some predictions. This is followed by helping the children focus their attention a little more carefully to try to find out something about their wondering, their question, or their speculation. That is where the focus comes in and the exploration has a slightly more defined direction to it. Focused exploration is supported by similar materials, but it has more structure. Then, out of this more focused exploration around a particular question come new ideas. What do I think I found out? What’s my theory about water now? And so forth.

There is a nonlinear/linear progression from a kind of open exploration to a more focused look at a specific piece to making some conclusions and then to developing a lot of new questions. In the books, the open and focused observation refers to allowing kids to have the openness of the initial exploration, so that they are experiencing the phenomenon in its richest sense, but then pushing them to focus more narrowly at a certain point and gather data, look at their data, develop some theories, and then communicate those theories. Thinking about teaching and learning science in this way is based in our perspective on inquiry as well as our understanding of children’s development. They come together rather nicely.

IC: I think that some very important things happen during open exploration that contribute to the quality of focused exploration. One of those things is that the children as a group build a foundation of common experiences with a phenomenon that serves as a launching pad or a place to build from. They also begin to build a language, a common language, for talking about what they are noticing. This becomes important as they move forward into focused exploration.

RP: You talk about children recording and documenting their investigations. How do preliterate children document their discoveries and why is it important to do this?

KW: Scientists always record and document what they do; otherwise they can’t repeat it or look back. Documentation also provides a way of thinking about what you’ve done. But I’ll let Ingrid talk about the representation documentation with nonreaders, which is one of our favorite parts.

IC: We see children’s representation of what they’re seeing and experiencing as an important part of the process in which children build understanding from their experiences. The media is selected based on what’s appropriate in relation to what’s being recorded by the children. For example, when children are discovering nature, observational drawing is a logical way for them to make records of what they are seeing and noticing. When they get to water and they’re studying water flow and there is movement involved, you need to look for other kinds of representation that would be more appropriate to what the children are communicating. The use of 3-D materials, such as clay or construction materials, drawing, painting, and movement are all appropriate kinds of representation/documentation for children to be a part of the record-keeping process.

The conversations that children have with the teachers around their work give a language to what they are doing. An added layer of the teachers taking dictation or helping with labeling is a valuable part of this process. These materials become a part of the living work of the classroom, and they contribute to the ongoing inquiry process. They help build important connections from one day to the next and help children recall what they have done and think about what will come next.

KW: A lot of what kids are thinking and reasoning about in relation to their experiences in science is focused around changes, finding patterns, and looking at relationships. To do that, you need to keep in mind what’s been going on over time. Documentation and recording, which are really shared efforts between children and teachers, are about helping make that process visible, so that reflection can occur and so children can go back to the beginning of a change or see a pattern over time.

We also encourage teachers to use digital cameras. With digital cameras, teachers have a wonderful way of documenting with instant results. Not all teachers have digital cameras, but when they do, there are some wonderful examples of how teachers have used them to supplement children’s own drawings.

But it’s amazing what the children can do on their own. We so often underestimate children’s abilities. Some of the drawings we have of children’s observations of snails, worms, and plants are quite extraordinary in their focus on a particular detail. They don’t look like a nature guide, but they do highlight what the children have noticed and observed. These drawings, coupled with words written down by the teachers, and some photographs, can provide a strong sense of an exploration. Children can then use these materials to look back and generate ideas and theories about what might have been going on. And, by the way, it also lets parents see lots of wonderful things. The documentation panels are great vehicles for teachers and kids to use in communicating with parents about what’s going on.

RP: A lot of programs for preschool focus on literacy and math. I recently heard that you are involved with a program in New York that is using science to meet literacy and math goals. Would you talk a little bit about using science curriculum for literacy and math?

KW: Mathematics and language are integral parts of science literacy, science learning, and the practice of science. So if we want children’s science knowledge to deepen, we must use mathematics and we must use literacy. What I like to say is that we’re using mathematics and literacy in order to improve science. It turns out, it improves the math and literacy too.

IC: I agree with Karen that our work is focused on science and when we talk about literacy, it is always literacy in the service of the science. We do, however, work with a school system that wants to use science as a way to get to literacy. One important thing about that is when children are engaged in literacy in the context of science, the science gives purpose to the literacy. It is a different kind of literacy learning than when literacy activities are done out of context. In science, if the children are reading a book, it is in order to find out something or to further their exploration. When the teacher is taking dictation or charting the children’s observations, the writing has a purpose, and for that reason decoding those words is important to the children. So having the kinds of literacy activities that lead to literacy learning within the context of science, I think, is better-quality literacy learning. I would say the same thing for social studies or other content areas. From a kids point of view, why bother to learn the letter this week. Well, if the letter is the first letter of the ant that you are studying, then there is a reason to learn it.

KW: The math is interesting too. While we focus a lot on the way children use language in our curriculum, mathematics is also a language of science. When children are building with blocks, they’re working with shapes, they’re working with positions, they're working with numbers. When they are looking at the number of leaves on plants, they’re counting. When they're looking at worms, they're looking at lines, and so forth. It is almost impossible to conceive of removing the mathematical thinking from science. If you think about what the primary focus of math at the preschool level is, it's very hard to think of anything that doesn't also get used in science.

So again, it's a marvelous way to put math in context. There are things to do in math that are lovely without science content, just as there are wonderful books to read that have nothing to do with science, but when you study something like science you are immediately and inevitably using these languages. By the way, that doesn't mean doing a worksheet on "3 acorns plus 2 acorns = 5 acorns," but it does mean sorting the acorns into the ones that are green and the ones that are brown, comparing and contrasting them, sorting, categorizing, and grouping them. The reason for doing those activities is because they contribute to the way that the children are looking at a phenomenon—acorns in this case. In a good science program, the children wouldn’t sort the acorns because they were practicing sorting, but because sorting was a part of an interesting study of the variation in the size and shape of acorns, and variation and diversity are fundamental ideas in science.

RP: During the National Science Foundation research that led to the Young Scientist Series, what did you learn, what were the challenges, and were there any surprises?

KW: I don't know if surprise is the word. I think we went into the research with a serious foundation of knowledge and understanding from our own backgrounds and previous work. I think one of the challenges was to design something that opens doors for teachers who may not have a lot of prior experience, scientific knowledge, and/or professional development. Another challenge was trying to meet the needs of varied populations, such as children in poorer settings, more diverse settings, or multi-language settings, and in the process presumably meeting the needs of the more privileged.

IC: I think I came out of it with an increased respect for the capacity of young children and, in particular, the populations that Karen referred to. Most of our teachers have stories about the child in their classroom who was identified as a special needs child and blossomed in science. The teachers in these situations gained a new understanding of the child and what he or she was capable of. I’ve been involved in professional development for years, but I do think that as a result of the four years on this project, I have a much more refined understanding of the role of the teacher and the ways in which teachers can encourage and promote children’s conceptual learning than I had previous to this.

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