Making Sense of Secondary Science

Research into children's ideas

Rosalind Driver, Peter Rushworth, Ann Squires, Valerie Wood-Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134860821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

When children begin secondary school they already have knowledge and ideas about many aspects of the natural world from their experiences both in primary classes and outside school. These ideas, right or wrong, form the basis of all they subsequently learn. Research has shown that teaching is unlikely to be effective unless it takes into account the position from which the learner starts.

Making Sense of Secondary Science provides a concise and accessible summary of the research that has been done internationally in this area. The research findings are arranged in three main sections:

* life and living processes
* materials and their properties
* physical processes.

Full bibliographies in each section allow interested readers to pursue the themes further.

Much of this material has hitherto been available only in limited circulation specialist journals or in unpublished research. Its publication in this convenient form will be welcomed by all researchers in science education and by practicing science teachers continuing their professional development, who want to deepen their understanding of how their children think and learn.

Part I
Children’s Ideas About Life and Living Processes

1
Living Things

The Concept of ‘Living’

Research on children’s ideas of ‘living’ has been in progress since the 1920s. However, we can define ‘living’ by contrasting living things either with inanimate objects or with dead organisms and these alternatives have not always been distinguished in the research.

The pioneering studies on children’s ideas of ‘living’ were carried out by Piaget¹ who observed that children tend to regard many inanimate objects as capable of sensations, emotions and intentions. He called this view ‘animism’. Young children said that such things as the sun, cars, the wind, clocks and fires ‘know where they are’ and could ‘feel a pinprick’. When asked what is and is not alive, they judged these same objects to be alive. Piaget showed that children younger than 10 years old tend to interpret physical phenomena in terms of intention on the part of inanimate objects, saying, for example, ‘the sun is hot because it wants to make people warm’. He identified five stages in the development of the ‘life concept’ in children:

• Stage 0 (age 0–5)	No concept.
• Stage 1 (age 6–7)	Things that are active in any way, including falling or making a noise, are deemed alive.
• Stage 2 (age 8–9)	All things that move, and only those, are deemed alive.
• Stage 3 (age 9–11)	Things that appear to move by themselves, including rivers and the sun, are deemed alive.
• Stage 4 (over 11)	Adult concept: only animals are deemed alive, or animals and plants are deemed alive.

Carey² suggests that progression in the concept of ‘living’ is linked to the child’s developing conceptual framework about biological processes, given that young children (4–7 years) have little biological knowledge, but there is a marked increase by the ages of 9 and 10. Younger children therefore explain bodily functions of living things and the activity of inanimate objects using a ‘naïve psychology’ of human behaviour rather than concepts of biological function. This ‘naïve psychology’ is characterised by intentional causal reasoning in the child’s explanations, for example: ‘spinach makes Popeye strong because he likes it’, ‘the sun shines in order to keep us warm’. As the biological knowledge of the child grows, the idea of biological function develops apart from human intentional causality and animistic reasoning declines.

Piaget’s work prompted a number of other studies, in various countries and cultures, and an extensive literature on childhood animism. In 1969 Looft and Bartz³ reviewed the literature from which it emerges that animistic notions are present in populations of all age ranges and great cultural differences. A recent study by Inagaki and Hatano⁴ suggests that young children use animism metaphorically as a model to explain phenomena, rather than believing that inanimate objects reason like human beings.

The words ‘living’ and ‘life’ may label different concepts. Klingberg, reported by Looft and Bartz,³ found that the question ‘Is (a certain object) living?’ produced different responses from the question ‘Has it life?’. These semantic distinctions have not always been acknowledged in designing research studies and they have given rise to much discussion of their effect on results.

Research in the 1970s attempted to delve into the biological criteria that children use in deciding whether something is alive. Smeets⁵ found that 11-year-old children used biological words in criteria for things that they considered as living, but that they did not distinguish the meanings of these words from similar ones. For example, the majority of children seemed to consider the following pairs of words identical in meaning: destruction and dying, seeing and knowing, contact and feeling, presence of ears and hearing, production of noise and talking, expanding and growing.

Looft⁶ reports that although thirty-nine out of fifty-nine 7-year-old children correctly classified sixteen items as living or non-living, this ability is not indicative of a biological grasp of the implications of the life concept. Over half of the thirty-nine understood the need for nutriment, but few applied a concept of breathing or of reproduction in defining living things, even when asked questions such as, ‘Does a frog breathe or need air?’.

Bell (formerly Stead)^{7 8 9} has pointed out that commonly used words such as ‘living’, ‘dead’ and ‘animal’ may be used to label different concepts by different people. She found that all but one of her sample of 9 to 15-year-olds used biologically accepted characteristics of life to justify their categorisation of examples as living things. Many used a combination of these attributes. However, she reports that only five out of thirty-two pupils had a concept of living similar to that of a biologist, despite up to four years of formal biology teaching. Most children over-extended the scientifically-accepted concept of living: they considered fire, clouds, the sun, a candle, a river and a car to be living. This usually resulted from the use of only one or a few critical attributes; for example, ‘A cloud is living because it moves’. Some pupils considered that an item such as a bicycle could be living at some times and non-living at other times. Many pupils acknowledged that they were unsure of their categorisations.

Arnold and Simpson¹⁰ investigated the concept of living things amongst Scottish pupils aged 10–15, including biology and non-biology students. All the pupils could use the term ‘living thing’ in context and could give appropriate examples, but in classifying eighteen examples and non-examples of living things there was no steady improvement from age 10–15, and non-biology certificate pupils performed better than biology pupils. Of the non-certificate (lower attaining) pupils aged 15, 28 per cent included at least one of the following as living: fire, milk, water, cloud, energy, car. Only 9 per cent correctly classified all eighteen items. The four most popular attributes chosen to identify living things were eating/drinking, moving/walking, breathing, growing. Only 36 per cent of 14- to 15-year-olds included respiration as a criterion of life although many had studied biology. Arnold and Simpson recommend a focus upon the unity of living things through attention to their characteristics. Leach et al. confirm these findings.¹¹ These researchers found that a few infant children were unfamiliar with the word ‘alive’. When they did recognise the word, most children at this age, and many up to 11, did not consider plants to be alive.

The results of Stavy and Wax,¹² from a study of children aged 5–16 in Israel, are similar. They found that almost all children recognised animal examples as living, but only 30 per cent of 6-year-olds, and 70– 80 per cent of 12- to 15-year-olds regarded particular plants as living. Almost all the children attributed growth to plants, but apparently did not consider this a prerequisite of life: 100 per cent of 8- to 11-year-olds stated that plants grow but only 69 per cent of them regarded plants as living. Stavy and Wax attribute their results in part to the Hebrew language, where the word for ‘life’ is similar to that for ‘animal’, but not to that for ‘plant’. Also the words for ‘growth’ and ‘death’ in animals are different from those applied to plants.

Tamir et al.,¹³ studying 424 Israeli pupils aged 8–14, also found that there was no significant difference with age in children’s ability to classify sixteen pictures as living or non-living. Over 99 per cent of the children classified all the animal pictures as living and 82 per cent of the responses correctly classified the plant illustrations as living, with the tree and the mushroom considered alive less frequently than the herbaceous plant. Moreover, 80 per cent of responses classified inanimate examples as non-living, with natural things like a river or the sun more frequently being considered alive than man-made objects. (Overall, 20 per cent of item responses were incorrect and this may represent far more than 20 per cent of individual children failing to classify correctly at least one item.) Responses about embryos were interesting: only half the children considered eggs to be alive whereas 60 per cent classified seeds as alive.

A progression from the ideas of the younger to those of the older students was apparent in the criteria they gave for classifying examples. Overall, the most popular criteria as indicators of life were movement for animals, and growth and development for plants and embryos. About half the reasons were based on life processes with more emphasis on biological processes and less on usefulness to man by the older children. Most of the children who classified inanimate items as alive believed that they have a different kind of life and about half thought that plants have a different kind of life from animals. The differences were related to supposed differences in movement, sensation and consciousness.

Lucas, Linke and Sedgwick^{14 15} used an unfamiliar object, in a photograph, to elicit concepts of life from nearly a thousand Australian children aged 6–14. The object was actually a lump of dough photographed on a sandy background and children were asked to write down how they could find out whether the object was alive, with clues about how to proceed: what would you look for? what would you do to it? what would it do?. The overwhelmingly common response (86–100 per cent, varying with age) was in terms of the behaviour of the object. The behaviour most children chose was some sort of movement, with an increase in this response through the primary grades and a decline through the early secondary years. However, analysis of the children’s range of responses revealed that even young children’s ideas of life are based on more than movement. Children at all grade levels applied a variety of criteria and consulted expert advice. At all grade levels more than 40 per cent of pupils suggested a criterion based on external structure. An increasing proportion at higher grades used an aspect of internal structure, such as blood or cells; a substantial proportion used physiological functions, such as heartbeat or respiration.

Brumby¹⁶ studied fifty-two British university biology students’ perceptions of the concept of life. She set four different problems, one of which was similar to that of Lucas et al. Her stimulus material was a weathered stone, rather than a photograph, and her other questions related to whether fire is alive, to evidence for life on Mars and to explaining the expression ‘the web of life’. Most students referred to the criteria used by young children, such as growth and movement. The seven characteristics of life (movement, respiration, sensitivity, growth, reproduction, excretion and nutrition) dominated their explanations but these were applied in an unsophisticated way and without reference to principles of scientific experimentation, suggesting that the seven characteristics had been rote-learned. Some responses included references to cells or organic chemicals, but there was hardly any mention of a self-replicating molecule. Brumby suggests that the ‘learning’ of fragmentary ‘facts’ had overwhelmed the curiosity and wonder of children as they became tertiary students and had contributed little towards understanding.

It should be noted that a number of researchers view as simplistic the notion that children classify objects as living or non-living by the systematic use of criteria. Carey² and Inagaki and Hatano⁴ suggest that factors such as movement may encourage children to view an object as living because children are likely to compare unfamiliar objects with objects known as living or non-living. They suggest that children are more likely to appeal to expert adult knowledge than to particular biological criteria in reaching their decisions.

Children often attribute human characteristics, thoughts, emotions and intentions to non-human things. It is not always clear whether children giving such anthropomorphic responses think that other organisms or objects really think like humans or whether they are speaking metaphorically.

Inagaki and Hatano⁴ point out that children distinguish people from other living...