The Conceptual Acquisition Status Of "Floating" And "Sinking" Among Children In Top Class In Kindergarten And The Role Of Education In Their Conceptual Change

The scientific literacy of a person is gradually formed and fostered during early childhood, so scientific education should be put into practice from early childhood. Wen Jiabao proposed that scientific education should start with children in the National Science and Technology Awards Conference of 2007, this also showed the importance of scientific education. The acquisition of scientific concept is an important way to develop scientific thinking for children, hence the learning of scientific concept is not only the important content but basic content for the scientific education of the pre-kindergarten children. Now, there were two different views for "scientific concept", one meaning "correct and reasonable concepts" contrasted with misconceptions and the other meaning "scientific concepts". In this paper, the scientific concepts include both the concepts listed above. "Floating" and "sinking" are two scientific concepts, and correct concepts implied that children transfer the prescientific concepts into scientific concepts. For children, the definition of "concept" is the understanding, attitude and views of one phenomenon. This paper discussed the study status of scientific concepts of pre-kindergarten children by two researches.In the first study, we selected 94 pre-kindergarten children from one kindergarten of Jinhua. By individual interviews, we analyzed their studying status for the concepts of "floating" and "sinking". Results showed that:(1) at the level of description,91.5% children can correctly use the concepts of "floating" and "sinking" to describe the corresponding phenomenon, but.8.5% children cannot, as for the example sentences based on objects; when there objects,87.2% and 75.5% children can correctly use the concept of "floating" and "sinking" to describe the corresponding phenomenon respectively, however 12.8% and 24.5% cannot; (2) at the level of distinguishment, the majority of children (93.6%) can correctly identify the phenomenon of "floating" and "sinking"; (3) at the level of definition towards "floating" and "sinking, pre-kindergarten children still are at the level of misconceptions, multiple definitions and objects; (4) when there are no objects,73.4% (or 71.3%) children can judge the phenomenon of "floating" (or "sinking")according to one essential factor. However, where there were objects,69.1% children can judge the phenomenon of "floating" and "sinking" according to one essential factor. Therefore, the majority of children can identify the phenomenon of "floating" and "sinking" according to one essential factor. However, they cannot combine various features, and the standard for judgment is not stable; (5) the level of making definitions was different for pre-kindergarten children of different ages.Based on the first study, the second study designed some teaching activities about "floating" and "sinking" in order to the effect of teaching activities on the conceptual changes. Results showed that the teaching activities promoted the changes of "floating" and "sinking" from prescientific concepts to scientific concepts to some extent:(1) the young children have a better understanding of the phenomenon of "floating" and "sinking", and they can make correct answers to some questions about "floating" and "sinking" after teaching activities. However, the children the level of making definitions about "floating" and "sinking" do not get promotion after teaching activities, which indicating that the scientific education for children cannot be restricted to the mastering towards definition; (2) when there were objects, the level of making definitions about "floating" and "sinking" gets significantly promoted; when there were no objects, the level of making definitions about "floating" and "sinking" does not get significantly promoted. This implied that object teaching is the basic way for the mastering of abstract concepts.