Children's Naive Physics And Early Childhood Science Education: Promoting The Coordination Of Theory And Evidence

There are underestimations of children's cognitive ability in early childhood education. For example, many people ignore the existing knowledge and experiences of young children, regarding them as misconceptions, incoherent and bounded with perceptions. This underestimation generates a big obstacle, which constrains the studies and reforms of the early childhood education. Recently, the naive theory approach grew from developmental psychology has pointed out this problem of underestimating young children's theories. Naive physics, naive psychology, and naive biology are three main naive theories of children's (Wellman & Gelman, 1998). Many developmental psychologists and educators start to pay more attention to related issues, such as what children's naive physics is, what its characteristics are, and how to apply the discoveries of children's naive physics to early childhood education in general and science education for young children in particular, etc.The research method of this study is a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methodology. The initiate study explores children's ability of distinguishing between self-initiated movement and no-self-initiated movement through experimental research. Following work is qualitative analysis on children's explanations, predictions and strategies of dealing with anomalous data regarding force and motion. Finally, the main method of discovering children's naive physics theory is dialogism on designed topics, including children's works and classroom activities, etc.Taking the dimension of force and motion as example, as well as important ingredient of children's naive physics, the discoveries from this study are:I Children's knowledge of force and motion includes: (a)Force is substantial or an property of a substance; force can be transferred or consumed; force can be initiated internally or from outside; (b)There is distinction between self-initiated movement and no-self-initiated movement; it is more likely that the movements of gas, liquid, celestial bodies, and falling down objects are self-initiated movements. (c)An object moves because of force; it rests because of the absence of force; the reason for an object from motion to rest is the exhausting of force, (d) Also there are considerable knowledge and assumptions regarding tracks of a motion.II The characteristics of children's naive physics include (a) Children's naive theories has a hierarchical framework, (b) Occasionally children's naive physics is coherent with evidence they observed, but in more circumstances, there are incoordination between children's theory and evidence, (c) In some degree, children'snaive physics shows coherent and consistent in its development, (d) Children may not have clear awareness and reflection on the theories they already hold, (e) Those theories of young children are qualitative and descriptive, instead of quantitative and interpretative. The most significance characteristic of children's naive physics is the incoordination of theory and evidence. The incoordination includes (a) Children have difficulty to differentiate theory and evidence, (b) Children's notions are in bondage to theory or data. For example, sometimes children distort the evidence, or merely describe what has happened without coherent explanation.IIlThe strategies young children use to deal with anomalous data include (a) ignoring data, (b) rejecting data; (c) excluding data; (d) holding data in abeyance; (e) reinterpreting data; (f) changing their theories peripherally; (g) changing their theories in more fundamental ways.Based on the discoveries of this study, there are some suggestions to early childhood education, especially to the science education for young children, are as follows:I Children's naive theories are subjugated theories. But the effects of science education are affected deeply by the acceptance of children's naive theory. According to this, children's naive theory must be legitimated.II The coordinate between theory and evidence should be the a...