To understand the essential characteristics of children's science education, we must first study and clarify what science is and what children's cognitive characteristics are.
First, what is science?
When it comes to science, people may first think of the knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and other disciplines, or what comes to mind is the scene of scientists conducting experimental research. But people don't agree on what science is, and it is difficult to define it accurately. Besides, science has such a long history. In this historical process, science interacts with society in various ways, and science itself constantly enriches and changes its own significance in the process of development. Nevertheless, with the development of science, people's understanding of science is becoming more and more in-depth and comprehensive.
Since19th century, the traditional view is to define science as a systematic knowledge system. As a knowledge system, science includes concepts, principles and theories. This definition summarizes the essence of science from the results and established forms, and has its own profound points.
With the development of society, people gradually find that it is not enough to define science as a knowledge system. Science is an activity of seeking knowledge. Einstein once defined science as "the experience of exploring meaning". This reminds us that science is not only an acquired knowledge system, but also a process of exploring the meaning of natural things through personal experience and then understanding the world. As a cognitive activity, science includes three basic elements: exploration, interpretation and testing.
Many scholars have demonstrated that science is an achievement and science is a process from the perspective of scientific epistemology. Science is not only a result, but also a process, and it is also a kind of value or attitude, including curiosity about the world. I believe that the world can be recognized, seeking truth from facts and innovating cooperation. Therefore, the connotation of science includes three basic elements: scientific attitude and value, scientific process and method and scientific knowledge.
Second, what are the cognitive characteristics of children?
When discussing children's cognitive characteristics, many scholars put forward that every child is a little scientist. Indeed, in the long river of life, children before entering school have the most similarities with scientists, but with the growth of age, they are influenced and suppressed, and the similarities are less and less. The characteristics of children's understanding of things mainly include the following aspects.
Every child is a natural scientist.
Children are as curious and eager to explore as scientists, which is innate and can be said to be inherited from our ancestors. Children are born scientists. They are curious and curious. They are full of vigor and energy and tirelessly explore the world around them. It is precisely because of their strong curiosity and desire to explore that every child has a pair of keen eyes. Nothing can escape children's attention, especially what they don't know or are forbidden to touch. The more they want to explore or try their own ideas. After listening to interesting stories, in order to know who is talking in the tape recorder, they will try to turn it on; After the rain, the more we warn children that stepping into a puddle will wet their shoes and pants, the more children should step into the puddle ..... This curiosity and enthusiasm for inquiry is no less than that of scientists.
As long as we pay attention, we will also find that children's initial worries are related to the natural environment. Why is the sky blue? Why is the grass green? Why does it rain? Why does the moon live in the sky? Why is the sun round? Why do birds fly in the sky ... These phenomena and problems that children care about are precisely the most basic scientific problems. It can be said that scientists are doing what children are doing naturally in a professional way and looking for answers to the questions that children are most concerned about.
(b) Children know things through direct experience.
Children are not only curious, curious and concerned about many "profound scientific problems", but also brave practitioners and people who know things through direct experience.
Psychological research has repeatedly proved that children's age characteristics determine that their understanding of things is perceptual and concrete, and thinking often needs the help of action. Their understanding of the material world must also take concrete things and materials as the intermediary and bridge, relying largely on the direct operation of objects. For example, when faced with a pool of mud, a child may think, "What if I step on it?" ? What happens when mud steps on it? Will it squeeze up from my toes? "Then, he stepped on it to prove his idea.
As we said before, the more children are not allowed to step in the puddle after the rain, the more they have to walk in the puddle and try their best! Children acquire relevant knowledge through direct interaction with things. As Piaget said, knowledge does not come from the object, nor from the subject, but from the interaction between the subject and the object.
Not only that, children, like scientists, are also using scientific inquiry methods, but unconsciously. Moreover, due to the limitation of experience level and thinking characteristics, the process and methods of children's exploration and problem solving are very trial and error. Their understanding of the characteristics of things and their discovery of the relationship between things. You need to try many times or constantly eliminate irrelevant factors to get close to the answer. A 3-and-a-half-year-old child wanted to make sugar balls out of plasticine when he first touched it. He tore it into small pieces and then made sugar balls out of a few small pieces of plasticine. The teacher found that every time he pulled a piece of plasticine, he rubbed it on his face and asked curiously, "What does this mean?" "The child said seriously," I'll try whether the plasticine is sticky or not. "Children have been trying meticulously. Occasionally he forgot to wipe it on his face, so he immediately took it back and tried it again ... After more than 30 times, he stopped trying and finally believed in the stickiness of plasticine.
(3) Children's knowledge and experience are unscientific.
Children's knowledge and experience in understanding and explaining things are directly influenced by their original experience and thinking level, forming a unique "naive theory" and "unscientific knowledge and experience" in early childhood.
Children always use their own original experience to explain things. The teacher said that it is good for children to drink boiled water, and children will water the flowers with boiled water; Knowing that seeds can germinate and grow up when soaked in water, he will pick up small petals that fall to the ground and soak them in water to make them grow up.
Children can't grasp the essential characteristics of things, and the explanation of things and their relationships is only a superficial phenomenon based on concrete perception. When asked "why doesn't the moon fall", children will answer "the moon doesn't fall because it is bright". When exploring ways to connect small electric lights, children will be pleasantly surprised to report that he has found a new connection method, even though he just stands the battery horizontally on the desktop, and the connection method has not changed at all.
Children always look at things and their relationships with "children's unique eyes", and the explanation of things and their relationships has the color of "man-made" and "animism", which we have long known.
They believe that everything is created by people; They also believe that natural things, like him, are alive, conscious, intentional and emotional.
These limitations of children's cognitive development determine that the scientific knowledge they can understand is unscientific to a certain extent, which also determines that they can't learn real scientific concepts like primary and secondary school students, but can only get some superficial knowledge and experience about the world around them.
Third, the characteristics of early childhood science education
Through the analysis of what is science and children's cognitive characteristics, we deeply realize that children's science education should not be equal to the previous common sense education, nor should it just add some new contents and hands-on common sense education.
Children's science education should be a process of arousing, supporting and guiding children to actively explore and benefit from the experience of the surrounding material world and its relationship. It is also a process of realizing the long-term educational value of being happy and able to learn, which is beneficial to children's lifelong development. Its basic features are as follows.
(A) Long-term goals
Pursuing the great goal beneficial to children's lifelong development is the value orientation of children's science education. Nowadays, the rapid development of society has caused great changes in education. With the advocacy and implementation of lifelong education, children's learning has stepped out of the narrow scope of the past and began to become a complete process throughout their lives. This means two important changes:
First, a person can't adapt to the social life of his life only by relying on more than ten years of school education, and he must keep learning all his life;
Second, preschool education, as the initial stage of life, should prepare for a person's lifelong learning and development.
For the sake of children's lifelong learning and development, children's science education should pay attention to children's learning fun and the educational goal and value of learning, emphasize the cultivation of children's intrinsic learning motivation and interest, and develop children's continuous learning ability.
If children's interest in learning is cultivated through science education, children will have a dynamic mechanism for lifelong learning. If children get methods to explore and solve problems by studying science, they can constantly use these methods to acquire knowledge and solve various problems.
When our expected educational content conflicts with children's interests and needs, we must never seek knowledge transfer at the expense of children's interest in learning.
(B) the content and generation of life
Life-oriented educational content is an important prerequisite and condition to trigger children's active learning and inquiry. The educational content close to children's life not only provides the premise and possibility for children to acquire scientific knowledge and experience that can be truly understood and internalized, but also, only when children truly experience the significance of the learning content to themselves and those related to them, which is the problem they want to understand and solve at present, can they actively study and explore, discover and feel the magic of the surrounding world, and experience and comprehend science at their side, can they maintain a permanent strong curiosity and desire to explore.
Children take the initiative to learn what they are interested in, and the effect is good. We have known this for a long time. Not only that, in fact, the problems that children are interested in and want to explore and solve have already implied the content that conforms to educational goals and values. Teachers should be good at discovering and using the things that children are interested in, the questions they want to explore and the content they like to generate scientific educational activities; Be good at discovering, protecting and cultivating children's scientist-like curiosity and interest in inquiry.
This feature of children's science education is to cultivate children's interest and curiosity in inquiry, to guide children to understand the practical significance of science, to obtain the dynamic mechanism of lifelong learning, and also to ensure children to acquire truly internalized scientific knowledge and experience.
Exploration process
Children's science education should be a process of guiding children to explore, discover and acquire knowledge. In other words, children's knowledge and experience are no longer directly told and taught to children by teachers, but acquired by children themselves. Children are active learners, and the role of teachers is no longer to explain or demonstrate to children step by step with examples or operational experiments, but to support, trigger and guide children's exploration and discovery process.
At present, many teachers think that children's activities and operations are active learning and exploration, which is a cognitive bias. In fact, real active learning and exploration must meet two basic conditions: one is the interaction between children and things, that is, children's activities and operations; The second is the interaction between children's original experience and new discovery. In other words, the child's operation is to verify his own ideas, not the teacher's ideas or the answers the teacher told him. When letting children match green, the teacher told them that blue and yellow can match green, and then let them operate. This kind of educational guidance is to let children verify the teacher's ideas or the answers the teacher said through operation. This is not a real exploration. To really guide children to explore actively, we should let them mobilize their original experience and fully guess what color and what color will turn green together. Children may guess more than one result: they may think that it is blue plus yellow, or they may think that each color needs to add some points; You may also think that you should add some water to the blue, and then add some ... Children are eager to know whether their guesses are correct after fully guessing and predicting. At this time, the teacher should encourage each child to operate according to his own ideas. The result of the operation will strengthen (if the result is consistent with the expectation) or adjust (if the result is inconsistent with the expectation) its original understanding. This process is a real active learning and exploration process and an active construction process of children's understanding. In other words, hand operation and heart operation and change are two indispensable conditions for active inquiry and learning.
(D) Empirical results
Different from the past, children's science education pays more attention to children's cognitive characteristics and the essential characteristics of science. Instead of pursuing the accurate and scientific concepts spoken by children, it emphasizes that children should go through the process of exploration and discovery and gain relevant experience. These experiences may be something that children can understand but can't say, or they may be naive and fairy-tale to adults, but children really experience the scientific spirit, scientific thinking mode and process in the process of exploring and acquiring knowledge. What's more, any scientific knowledge is constantly developing. When guiding children to know the wind, don't expect them to say "the airflow produces the wind", but to find and feel "the wind is really strong and blew my hat away!" "The wind makes my windmill turn for a while and stop for a while; Turn this way for a while, turn that way for a while.
In a word, children's interest in science and ways of thinking to solve problems should be germinated through scientific education, so as to prepare for their lifelong learning and development.