Preschool children’s conceptions of water, molecule, and chemistry before and after participating in a playfully dramatized early childhood education activity

When asked about the relevance of science, Swedish young generations state that science has low relevance for their lives. In an international comparative study called The Relevance of Science Education (ROSE), 15-year olds from 40 countries were asked about their attitudes to science education. The results show that the more developed a country, such as Sweden, the more negative and skeptical attitudes towards science. There was also a gender difference, with girls showing an even lower interest in (school) science than boys do and the trend is that the gap is increasing (Sjøberg and Schreiner 2010). Britt Lindahl (2003) also showed that the interest of Swedish students for physics and chemistry is low and decreases during the last years of compulsory school. As a probable result of the negative attitudes toward science, chemistry is a discipline that is seldom favored by high-school students when it comes to choosing what to study at the university level.

In order to change such trends and support learning and awareness of the presence and importance of chemistry in everyday life, a chemistry project was carried out at a culture center for children. The overarching ambition of the project has been to raise children’s interest in chemistry, with the intention, in the long run, to make more young people interested in studying chemistry at the university. Briefly, chemistry can be understood as the study of how different substances are constructed, processes and change, and about what happens when different substances meet; with the processes often described with verbs such as solve, mix, absorb, melt, freeze and evaporate (Sundberg, Areljung, Due, Ottander and Tellgren 2016).

The aim of this empirical study is to investigate how children participating in a playfully dramatized teaching activity make sense of the concepts of water, molecule and chemistry, before and after the educational intervention, made evident by the language they used and how they use these terms. Therefore, the research question asked is:

What it means to invite children to experience the world of science and make sense of invisible phenomena, for example, those conceptualized in terms of molecule, has interested many scholars. The fact that children have their own, rich conceptions of the surrounding world was something that Jean Piaget showed in his pioneering work, when he described how children reason about different natural phenomena (Piaget 1971). Through interview studies, Piaget saw that children’s conceptions of various aspects of the world often differed from what was scientifically accepted. A considerable amount of research has since been carried out with the aim of understanding what children know about the world. The ways in which their intuitive conceptions differ from scientifically accepted ideas have been extensively observed and discussed in research on learning in science education (e.g., Driver and Easley 1978; Osborne and Freyberg 1985; for an overview, see Duit 2009). However, while children’s thinking in these studies was often considered as an obstacle to be overcome in teaching, more recent research value children’s rich conceptualizations and consider these to be important, both to listen to and value (Robbins 2005, p. 153). For example, Christina Siry (2011, p. 2407) suggests, with reference to Joe Kincheloe, that research on children’s thinking should begin with the assumption that young children are capable of producing new knowledge about science phenomena.

The ways in which children understand the phenomena and processes explained by science have consequences for how instruction is organized for children and what they are supposed to learn. If children are positioned as naïve, with deficient thinking skills, teaching will have the aim of overcoming their misconceptions, to be successfully replaced by the scientifically accepted way of thinking and explaining phenomena. In contrast, if children are perceived as resourceful and their thinking seen as rich and diversified, teaching will need to relate to these conceptions as resources for developing children’s thinking further. This circumstance was explored by Kristina Andersson and Annica Gullberg (2014), who analyzed a teaching episode in preschool through two different analytical perspectives. From one of the perspectives, where the aim of teaching science was to develop children’s conceptual understanding about floating/sinking, the teaching activity was conceived as unsuccessful. But from the other perspective, a feminist approach (Barton 1998), the children’s feelings of participation within a scientific context were explored. The two analyses of the same teaching episode showed how different kinds of science were constituted, contingent on associated views of children. The first analysis did not indicate that the children’s scientific thinking developed or that the children learned scientific concepts, but the second analysis showed that the children had gained a positive experience of the activity of “sciencing” and of thinking about density. The different results of the two analyses thus also highlight how what is taken as indicators of learning is theory dependent and could be connected to the present study and the discussion about how scientific procedures and forms of explanation need to make sense to young children, but at the same time be true to scientific knowledge.

In another study, Siry (2011) described how children in first grade made their own discoveries about floating in an experiment by finding a way to make all the available objects (such as a small magnet and a spoon) float, through creating a swirl in the water. The children’s focus on preventing the objects from sinking made them try new ideas and ask new questions, indicative of complex and playful investigations about the relation between the density of objects and their possibilities of floating (Siry 2011, pp. 1021–1023).

A critique that can be raised against many studies on children’s conceptions, including the Piagetian studies, is the tendency to often focus solely on the children without taking the communicative situation and communicative processes into account. A different perspective is provided by Lev Vygotsky (1987), who highlights the significance of context and the pedagogical relation between the adult and child. An important concept in this tradition is the Zone of Proximal Development, that is, how a more experienced participant (adult or child) can support a learner to further his or her reasoning or problem solving. Conducting research in the Vygotskian tradition, Marilyn Fleer (1995, pp. 341–342) found it to be more critical to focus on concepts than procedures in communication with children in science settings and her study illuminates the importance of introducing children to conceptual resources in order for them to start becoming members of the problem-solving practices of basic science. In another study with a group of 6-year-old children (Åkerblom 2008, p. 100), they were invited to reflect on what they meant when they used scientific terms after being introduced to critical aspects of gravity and the movement of planets. The results illuminated the fruitfulness of using reflection to make sense of scientific phenomena, and also revealed that the children, while reflecting on their own language, became more aware of it. Another study conducted by Fleer (2009, pp. 1085–1086) examined how very young children develop conceptual understanding in science, drawing on Vygotsky’s writings on everyday and scientific thinking. Fleer concluded that the scaffolding of children’s understanding of science needs to include playful investigations of phenomena, as well as systematic exploration of scientific terms. Hence, her research highlights the importance of science education for young children to contextualize conceptual knowledge in playful activity, a point highly relevant to our present investigation.

Language and the way children express their knowledge has been shown to play an important role in the sense they make of scientific contents. For example, Joan Solomon and Sue Hall (1996) stated that language is vital for articulating the tacit and linking thought to action. Vygotsky (1987, p. 276) made a distinction between the sense of a word and its meaning and described sense as the sum of all psychological events in consciousness. Vygotsky considered that every concept has its own meaning and its own sense. Meaning could be called the semantic form of a concept that is closely related to what we call the culturally agreed on definition of a word. The sense of a word is the personal, creative aspect that “enriches” meaning, depending on the context of use. Meaning and sense are further connected to what Vygotsky referred to as scientific and spontaneous concepts (Vygotsky 1987, p. 366). Scientific concepts are mostly acquired in a school setting, in contrast to spontaneous concepts that are formed more informally during our everyday life. A scientific concept could be associated with meaning and everyday concept with sense.

The theoretical point of departure for the present study is Vygotsky’s theorizing on the formation of concepts. According to Vygotsky (1987), the motor for developing concepts lies in the dialectic relation between everyday concepts and scientific concepts (p. 169). Everyday concepts are something that children spontaneously create as they experience the world. When children express themselves, using their own concepts, they are not initially conscious of the function of these concepts, the relations being established later in more formal teaching activities (p. 214). Everyday concepts are rich with experience, contextual and practical associations, according to Vygotsky (1987). In contrast, scientific concepts are conscious and deliberate, generalized and with socially agreed meanings. Both ways of making sense of the world originate in encounters on the social plane but the concepts develop in different ways. Thinking and language interact at the moment when a verbal thought is formed. Following Vygotsky’s notion, we are interested in how children of a preschool age make sense of water. In other words, we are looking for children’s verbal thoughts about water. As the children verbalize their thoughts about water, they conceptualize it. In Vygotsky’s view, a concept is a generalized representation of a thing (Vygotsky 1987, p. 170), implying that the aim of learning and teaching is to form bonds and relations between representation and reference. Vygotsky also argues that when a child acquires new words, they gradually become more and more generalized. “Functional meaning” plays a very important role in children’s thinking (until the early school age). When asked to explain a word, the child will tell what word that the object designates can do, or—more often—what can be done with it (Vygotsky 1987).

Post-interviews were conducted with 11 children (see method), using pictures taken during the teaching activity as a mutual points of departure. The children were asked about what they remembered and they were supposed to reflect upon the pictures taken during the chemistry lesson, with the aim to explore what opportunities helped the children develop concepts in chemistry and how they responded to these opportunities. In the post-interviews, all the 11 children use the expression water molecule, but in quite different ways and with what seem to be different senses. They are also able to elaborate on the connection between the movement of water molecules and temperature, as exemplified in the following excerpt where Andy is shown pictures in which the children act as water molecules:In the pre-interview, when Andy is asked what water is made of, he answers “It is made of nothing; it is just made of water”, but in the post-interview he shows an awareness of a connection between water and water molecules. When Andy is asked what a water molecule is, he answers “they are things that are in water” and that “water molecules could be found in the sea”. Thus, he is using a culturally prevalent form of metaphor—a so-called container metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980)—according to which molecules are in something, in this case water, rather than making up that substance. There was a variation between how the children conceptualized the water molecule. The following utterance from the interview with Bill exemplifies shifting between (perhaps conflating) different levels of description: molecules are (round balls) and molecules resemble (Mickey Mouse). It further appears that he conceptualizes molecules as being alive and having the properties of being blue and soft:Bo answers in the following way:The two children, who in the pre-interviews spoke of water in a generalized way, are also able to use the notion of water molecule as a scientific concept, like Carla below, who also remembers and corrects her own previous utterance:Carla is aware that she knows just a little bit about molecules and that there might be more to know. In doing so, she identifies a learning gap, something that can be particularly productive when trying to learn more. She understands that there are different kinds of molecules, what she refers to as sugar molecules and air molecules, and that there can be water molecules in the air as well. Also Chris understands that there are many kinds of molecules and that they are incredibly small:When Chris states that molecules are parts of anything, he is generalizing over a set of cases and uses the notion of molecule as a concept proper (Vygotsky 1998, p. 60).When asked about the purpose of the chemistry activity, the children give answers that were qualitatively different. Some of the children focus on what they had seen, played and experienced; like the children below, describing what they had experienced rather than giving explanations:But the two children from the third category answer in a qualitatively different way, focusing on the chemistry content of the activity; Chris saying that “we made chemistry tests” and Carla stating that “We spoke about chemistry.”

When asked about what happened in the chemistry experiment carried out during the lesson, many children speak mainly about the green color, here exemplified by Bill:Some of the children, like Bim in the excerpt below, express the awareness of a connection between temperature and how the green color behaved:Another child, Chris, is able to speak about the molecular level in the experiment part:Inferring from the excerpt, it seems that Chris understands the purpose of using the candy color in the experiment, which was to show that sugar dissolves faster in warm water due to the rapid movement of the water molecules and slower in cold water due to the slower movement of water molecules. He understands that the shapes of green color in the water show where the sugar molecules are, forming a “beam” in cold water and a “cloud” in hot water, using these metaphors as parts of his explanation. In the end of the post-interview, the children were asked about water again, in the same way as in the pre-interviews. Three of the 11 children answer in the same way as they did before the intervention, like Barbara: “Water is blue and fun to play with, water is blue when it is cold…”, speaking about her former experiences with water on a macro level. Nevertheless, all the other eight children in the post interview mention that water “is made of water molecules”, which is something that suggests they had developed their conception of water and/or that they interpreted the questions differently after the activity.

The present study aimed at exploring what conceptions of water, molecule, and chemistry the children convey before and after participating in a playful dramatization of chemistry, and if the children’s conceptions change from before to after participating in the lesson.

If pooling the children’s reasoning, based on the pre-and post-interviews, the result can be used to illustrate the nature of appropriation (James Wertsch 1998), that is, how children develop their use of concepts in order to generalize experience on a more abstract level, making sense of chemical concepts and processes. In the nature of this process, and in the case of the appropriation of scientific concepts, children first learn that there is something that is called ‘molecule’ (or “monopoles”, as it may be) and then may be able to give first one, and then several examples of this, before developing the ability to understand the concept in the abstract (i.e., irrespective of any particular example). We found that the experience and conceptions that the children had before the activity were closely related to what they discerned in the activity.

When it came to the notion of water, most children could discern water as something and describe properties of water in terms of their first-hand experiences before the chemistry activity. They spoke about water in different ways, but all with a focus on its concrete functions and properties, as everyday/spontaneous concepts rich with experience, contextual and practical application (Vygotsky 1987). However, two of the children, Chris and Carla, would use the concept of water in a more scientific way, speaking about what the concept means, and showing an awareness that there is an explanation to phenomena such as forms of water or surface tension; they also use language in an expansive way that transcends the local contexts of the lesson and the interview, respectively. Chris even explores the phenomenon of water by staging experiments to find out “how it can be with water and how it can’t be with water” (see above) in making sense of his experience. In the transcripts, there are many examples of the children using scientific expressions as pseudo concept (Vygotsky 1998), that is, when they know that the word they use denotes something, and may be able to give several examples (of molecules), but it is not clear to them what it exactly means, what is the common conceptual basis, of these examples. One example is Barbara’s use of the expression oxygen, or when Bo speaks of steam in both interviews, having an idea about what context they fit in, and expressing a vague idea about what they mean. Carla is approaching a scientific understanding of the concept of molecule, but still claims that she realizes that she does not know enough about molecules, thus identifying a learning gap, which shows that she is able to speak about her own understanding on a meta-level. Being able to speak on this meta-level has been shown to be very productive in children’s learning (e.g., Åkerblom 2015).

The same development can be seen in the post interviews in relation to the concept of molecule. Most children indicate that they had not heard the word before the activity, but afterwards they were familiar with the notion of molecule, as evident either by them spontaneously mentioning it themselves or in responding to a more direct question about it. However, for some of the children, molecule denoted something very concrete, contextual and practical that they conceptualized in everyday terms, taking the metaphoric representation at face value, like the water molecule having properties such as being blue or soft. After having experienced the lesson at the culture centre, the children showed that they had grasped the points made in the part we named Experience part. This was the part where the children themselves acted as molecules and experienced being either a water molecule or a sugar molecule in a glass of water. The aim of this activity was to highlight the relation between temperature and the speed of molecules. In other words, all the children realized that the speed of molecules is connected to temperature. However, there were some ideas, often discussed as alternative conceptions, regarding the properties of molecules that were unintentionally supported during the Introduction and the Experiment part of the lesson. Also, in order to make basic science applicable to the children, an actor impersonating the water molecule was used to playfully connect to something known and attractive to the children. Many children appreciated the figure and said that it was funny when “she pretended to be a water molecule”, which indicates them being aware of the metaphoric/representational dimension. Presenting chemistry in such a playful mode could probably enhance children’s positive feelings towards chemistry, but at the same time, as explanations of chemical processes or about properties and function of the molecule as such, the presentation might have added to the children’s confusion, and, as we have already mentioned, fostered what is often referred to as misconceptions, since the cues about how to actually interpret the dramatization were not very clearly given. There is an inherent tension at play in early childhood science education, since scientific procedures and forms of explanations need to be rendered in a form that is true both to scientific knowledge and to what makes experiential sense to young children. As Andersson and Gullberg (2014) point out, on some occasions, children’s feelings of joy and participation within a scientific context might also be an adequate goal. Hence, there may be other goals with early childhood science education than only the development of children’s conceptual understanding.