Talking Sense in Science

Helping Children Understand Through Talk

Douglas P Newton, Douglas Newton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134525522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Talking Sense in Science is a highly practical guide to getting the most out of primary science lessons through talking with children. This clearly written and straightforward book helps teachers to support understanding by developing their own interaction in the classroom. Each idea is described, illustrated and followed by a short task to develop teaching skills. This book looks at ways of understanding in science, and scientific language as well as how talk can support practical activities. Douglas Newton also addresses the ideas of what to say, when to say it and how to say it, with a view to developing understanding through science conversation. Examples given in the book span the range of primary school science topics, and provide an ideal sourcebook for lesson ideas. Talking Sense in Science is an essential buy for primary teachers who want an accessible way to improve their practice and their pupils' understanding in science. It is also an ideal learning tool for student teachers.

Part 1
Understanding and science: why and what

The aim is to help children understand their science.You cannot give them an understanding.Ultimately,they must construct it for themselves but you can do a lot to help that process. In the child’s mind, understandings could range from superficial and fragile to profound and secure. To begin with, a child’s understanding may be limited, even tentative, and it may not sit comfortably with what the child already knows. Such an understanding needs to be nurtured if it is to survive. It helps if you have a fairly clear idea of the kind of understanding you want. Of course, a clear target is not enough.You always have to make what you say meaningful, otherwise you do not make contact with the children’s thinking. In this part of the book, the nature of some understandings in science is illustrated and what makes them worthwhile is discussed. It concludes with some thoughts about the language of science and how it can be made meaningful for the children.

1.1 WHY UNDERSTAND?

Constructing an understanding for yourself or helping someone to understand can take a lot of mental effort. Is it worth it? Compare Maurice Memorizer and Marvin Makesense. Maurice spends his time memorizing as much as he can. Marvin tries to makes sense of it. As a result, Marvin is not always as quick as Maurice when it comes to giving answers but Maurice generally comes unstuck when he meets something new. For example, there was a torch that would not work. Maurice remembered that he had seen people change the bulb when that happened. He tried it but the torch still did not work.‘No problem’, he thought, ‘I’ve also seen people change the battery to make a torch work’. He tried that, too, but it still did not work. All he could do now was poke around at random and hope something would happen.‘I don’t really know what I’m doing’, he thought.

Marvin understood electricity so he had a try. ‘For the bulb to work, we need a complete circuit for the electricity to flow around. As the battery and bulb are new, it’s more likely that there is a break in the circuit.’ He followed the path that the electricity would have to take from the top of the battery, through the bulb, through the switch and to the bottom of the battery. At the bottom of the battery was a spring that the electricity had to pass through.The old battery had left a white deposit on it. ‘That’s it!’ he thought, scraping it off. ‘That’s what is breaking the circuit.’ The circuit was now complete, the bulb lit, the problem was solved, and it was understanding that did it.

Here, understanding helped Marvin deal with something he had not met before. Unlike Maurice’s memorized knowledge, Marvin’s knowledge is flexible and can be applied in new situations. More than that, understanding supports further learning and is a durable kind of knowledge. Think of the early understanding of money that people develop when they are quite young. It lasts a lifetime and underpins their greater understanding of money matters that they develop subsequently. In the same way, I still remember my first understanding of the reflection of light from a flat mirror.The teacher made an analogy with a ball bouncing off a wall and this helped me grasp what happened to the light rays. Much later, I found it helped me grasp explanations of how curved reflectors, like spoons, produce their peculiar images. An understanding can also help people resist manipulation and exploitation. With it,it is more difficult for others to take advantage or act against our best interests. Similarly, a grasp of ways of working in science can help us evaluate claims about the testing of a variety of products from soap powders to genetically modified crops.But,not everything that is worth understanding is of immediate, practical use. If the reason for understanding rested only on that, a lot of what we teach – even in science – would have no place. Knowing about space, the planets and the stars, for instance, probably has little practical utility for most people. Nevertheless, they often want to understand such things. Having an understanding of our place in the world (the universe in this case) and knowing why things are as we see them satisfies a psychological need. Children show this need in their curiosity and interest.Taken together, these reasons for understanding make it worth the effort.

This is not to say that memorization is worthless. There will be times when Maurice’s memorized knowledge solves the problem. In the same way, memorizing how to fasten a shoe lace is very useful. You do not need to understand knots to master shoe lace fastening and, since the fastening of shoe laces may be a daily occurrence, it serves a useful purpose.There is much in life that we might memorize without understanding. For instance, most people could get through life quite successfully and happily knowing how to fasten only a bow, a granny knot and a slip knot.For most of us,time could probably be better spent than in understanding knots. There are some people, however, like designers of weaving and knitting machines and mathematicians, who could find understanding knots to be both useful and interesting.

Given everything that might be understood in the world and the limited time each of us has in school, teaching must focus on understandings that we believe are important,enlightening,applicable,relevant and capable of enabling someone to live and work in a complex, technological society. This includes the understandings that help us grasp our place in the natural and physical world.

1.2 SOME KINDS OF UNDERSTANDING IN SCIENCE

The things we teach in science are usually associated with nature’s patterns and regularities. For example, we might understand:

• physical appearances or spatial arrangements, as presented in a diagram of the solar system, the layers in the Earth, the organs of the human body, the divisions of an insect’s body, the parts of a plant, and the shape of a shadow
• properties, such as hardness, opacity, roughness, conductivity
• natural laws, such as the way light reflects from a mirror
• phenomena and events resulting from such properties and laws, such as shadows, friction, echoes, why the ice cube has a bump on the top
• conditions, such as those needed for plants to grow and crystals to form
• functions, such as those of the lungs, heart and the bladder
• processes, such as melting, dissolving, decaying, growing and developing
• procedures, such the sequence of actions that will locate a fault in an electrical circuit or the steps in an investigation.

Figure 1.1 illustrates some aspects of science that could appear in an elementary science lesson. We can know these in different ways. For instance, we could know enough to name and describe the organs in the body and where they are situated. Similarly, we could describe the appearance of the crystal,and point out its regularities. We could describe how to help something dissolve by stirring it. We could describe the appearance and feel of the materials used to insulate a loft and we could tell someone what writing looks like in a mirror and that it can be read using a second mirror. But this is just a start. We could know,for instance, why I get a stitch when I run, why a crystal is so regular, why stirring can speed up dissolving, why loft insulation works and why a second mirror makes the image of writing in the first mirror look normal. In turn, these understandings may enable us to, for example, know how we might reduce the risk of certain lung diseases, explain how crystals ‘grow’,make a sweet last longer,choose a fabric to make a warm sweater and understand why AMBULANCE is printed oddly on the front of the vehicle.

Figure 1.1 The arrangement of the body’s organs, crystal formation, dissolving things, loft insulation, reflections in a mirror

Descriptive understanding

If children have a descriptive understanding of a topic,they can describe it. For instance, after a lesson about the solar system, they may be able to tell you what it is like on the surface of some of the planets. In some instances,it is as though they have constructed a mental ‘picture’of what you want them to know. The actual words you used to describe the situation (the solar system) may be forgotten but the child is able to use the mental ‘picture’ and his or her own words to give you a meaningful account of it. In this way, children may know the physical arrangement of some of the organs in the human body and what they do, the relationship between the length of a shadow and the height of the sun, the supply of water to a plant and its survival, the angle of the ramp and the distance the truck travels, the predictable way that light reflects from a flat mirror, what is meant by hardness and melting and how to proceed in a particular investigation, as when finding the relative strength of different materials. With descriptive understanding,however, the reasons underpinning these may not be known. For instance, with only descriptive understanding, the child is unlikely to know why the stomach can digest food or why a thin wire carrying a large electrical current can become hot.

Explanatory understanding

If children have an explanatory understanding, they have a descriptive understanding of the situation and some relevant reasons or causes for it. They can, for instance, tell you that the moon has craters because it has been hit by lumps of rock from space. This means they can attempt to answer such questions as: Why is it like that? How did it arise? Why is it the way it is? For instance, with an explanatory understanding they can respond reasonably to such questions as: Why is a shadow always on the side furthest from the source of light? Why is a hedgehog prickly? What makes some things feel rough? What causes friction? What causes echoes? Why does a plant need light to survive? Why does a woollen scarf keep you warm? Why do things decay? Why does a steeper ramp make the toy truck go farther? Why does finding a break in a light bulb filament tell us it will not work in an electrical circuit? Understandings like these are sometimes neglected but they are one of the central aims of science. It is important that children learn that science is about more than naming and describing. They need to be introduced to reasons for things as they become capable of grasping them. This does not mean, of course, that reasons have to be complex. There are levels of explanation.There are levels of explanation.There are levels of explanation. For example, at one level, we might ask,‘How does a periscope work?’ and provide an answer by drawing on our understanding of the way light reflects from a mirror. Children could probably grasp that. But children could also ask, ‘Why does light reflect from a mirror like that?’ They are unlikely to grasp the fundamental physical reasons for the regular reflection of light from a flat mirror. Instead, we might overcome that by drawing parallels with the way a ball bounces off a smooth wall, as in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Light reflecting from a flat mirror like a ball bouncing off a wall and how a periscope lets us see over a wall

Procedural understanding

Procedural understanding is about grasping the way of doing something. In science, there are ways of using a hand lens and of carrying out an investigation. We expect children to learn both. The first might be a simple task while the second is developed over several years. Procedural understanding can be descriptive or explanatory. If, for instance, a child can tell you how to use a thermometer, his understanding is at least descriptive. If he can tell you why you should use it like that, the understanding is explanatory. The development of procedural understanding, often associated with scientific inquiry, exploring in a systematic way and testing ideas, is frequently a valued outcome of science teaching. Again, this kind of understanding can be descriptive or explanatory: you can know what to do only or you can know what to do and why it is appropriate to do it that way. Suppose a child wants to know what woodlice prefer to eat. She thinks they may eat damp soil, damp wood or damp straw because these were where she found them. She designs a test in which she places equal amounts of the possible foodstuffs at equal distances from her woodlice, which are under a box. At this point, this is evidence that she has at least some descriptive procedural understanding. She knows she should ‘make things the same’ (here, amounts and distances).This girl, however, can also give reasons for the equal amounts and distances. She can tell you that if they were not equal, it would not be fair. More than that, if one lot of food was closer than the others to the woodlice, they might go to that one because it was easier than going to the others. If one pile was bigger than the others, the woodlice might go to that one because they are greedy creatures or want to use it as a hiding place. This would be evidence of some explanatory procedural understanding. When she opens the box, she finds woodlice at all the materials. She is, however, cautious, and does not claim that the woodlice eat all these and gives a reason:‘They might just like to be where it’s cool and damp’. This is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Understanding and Science: Why and What
• Part 2: Helping Children Understand: Guiding Thought
• Part 3: Doing More for Understanding
• Part 4: Conversations In Science
• Endnote
• Glossary
• Further Reading and Some Examples of Resources to Support Science Talk and Conversations