Urban Primary-Grade Children Think and Talk Science: Curricular and Instructional Practices That Nurture Participation and Argumentation

摘要

We focus on the concept of matter and explore how young children in urbanschools bridge their spontaneous concepts and everyday experiences with scientific conceptsintroduced to them by children's literature information books and their teacher. The studyshows how material artifacts used in a sorting activity became ideational tools—semioticdevices that promoted children's engagement with science and shaped the classroom dis-course, thinking, and transactions. "Ambiguous" objects, such as a baggie with air, shavingcream, a baggie of salt that children were asked to sort, encouraged them to debate ideasabout states of matter. Children used four ways of reasoning about states of matter: macro-scopic properties, prototypes, everyday functions, and process of elimination. Furthermore,children's meaning making was intertwined with various socio-organizational aspects ofinquiry—the ways in which children negotiated their roles within their group and in whole-class sessions, how they worked with each other, how their ideas were heard by others. Wediscuss how curricular and instructional approaches that do not lead children to one specificanswer or way of thinking become catalysts for the creation of discursive spaces, wherechildren and teacher engage in meaning making in the midst of ambiguity and confusion.