**2. Can preschoolers learn about scientific facts?**

46 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition

learning.

young children.

2004, for a summary). Many of these findings have had the effect of changing how children are taught, for example by pushing more complex curricula early on, building upon children's already existing understanding, and supporting children's abstract reasoning skills (e.g., Brenneman, Stevenson-Boyd & Frede, 2009; Eshach & Fried, 2005). In the current chapter we review the research findings of these efforts, focusing explicitly on early science

The area of science learning, while only a small part within the field of children's learning, has several features that warrant interest for the cognitive-development community. First science concepts are abstract, transcending a concrete context that commonly embeds everyday concepts. As such, science learning relates to the emergence of abstract thought, knowledge transfer and symbol manipulation. Second, scientific concept formation is a specific case of everyday concept formation, thus shedding light on the dynamics of collapsing large amounts of information into systematic beliefs (cf., Havu-Nuutinen, 2005). Third, a focus on early learning is likely to uncover the spontaneous working of the mind, processes yet unaffected by formal instruction or by standardized assessment. An understanding of preschoolers' science learning therefore transcends the field of early childhood education and sheds light on the spontaneous development of abstract thought in

Note first that early science learning is a rather unorganized terrain. Unlike the areas of reading or math, this area still grapples with questions of what constitutes success in science learning, how learning should progress, and how to assess its milestones. There are no generally agreed-upon 'letters' that form the alphabet of science, and there are no central 'operations' in science that constitute the base upon which to build. Indeed, research studies differ greatly in how 'science' is defined in the first place, for example whether science concepts need to be abstract, relevant to every-day experience, or interconnected with other concepts. Similarly, assessment tools differ greatly in whether they measure the presence of a particular concept, the way it is applied, or its semantic network. As a result, there are no generally accepted instructional tools (cf., Kirchner, Sweller & Clark, 2006), and there are no generally accepted assessments that could capture milestones of science learning across curricula (for reviews see Brenneman, 2011; Scott-Little, Lesko, Martella, & Milburn, 2007).

For our purposes, science is defined to incorporate two aspects: scientific facts and concepts, and the processes by which science knowledge is generated. These two aspects – knowledge of science concepts and knowledge of how the science concepts were derived – are of course closely linked (cf. Schauble, 1990). We nevertheless treat them as separate for the purpose of organizing the research findings on early science learning. Note also that this review is by no means exhaustive. The literature on young children's science learning has exploded in the last decade, being published in numerous educational and cognitive-development journals, as well as in journals devoted to this topic entirely (e.g., *Science and Children; Research in Science Education*). Here we present a cross-section of pertinent research, as a means of finding a common thread and setting the stage for a more integrated discussion

The current chapter is a first step towards filling this gap.

A central part of science is a shared understanding of concepts and facts, for example from the domain of physical sciences, life sciences, or earth and space sciences. Research in cognitive development has documented that even young children know something about these science domains. For example, young children know that the behavior of objects is affected by their physical properties (cf., Kotovsky & Baillargeon, 1998; Schilling & Clifton, 1998); they know that the identity of living things is determined internally (Simons & Keil, 1995; Springer, 1995); and they understand the effect of gravity (e.g., Vosniadou, 1994). Of course, sometimes their beliefs are mistaken; they hold misconceptions. For example, children believe that heavy stuff sinks fast (e.g., Kloos & Somerville, 2001; Penner & Klahr, 1996), that the sun is alive, but not plants (Venville, 2004), or that the earth is disc-shaped (e.g., Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). To what extent can early science instruction build upon children's existing knowledge to convey new facts and change mistaken beliefs?

*Conveying Something New.* Science facts differ in the degree to which they rely on concrete versus abstract pieces of information. That is to say, science facts vary in whether relevant pieces of information are readily perceivable – or whether they need to be extracted from irrelevant information. That a spider has eight legs requires a relatively low level of abstraction, because the fact's relevant pieces of information are readily accessible in a single event. By contrast, the idea that caterpillars turn into butterflies is more abstract: caterpillars and butterflies need to be conceptually connected, while differences between the two need to be ignored (e.g., shape, behavior). Similarly, the idea that water can turn into ice is less abstract than the idea that materials consist of particles that are invisible to the naked eye. The latter requires the learner to ignore salient features of an object (e.g., the shape or size of a material), and instead note underlying patterns of how materials interact and change.

Can young children learn low-abstraction science facts? This question is relatively trivial, as one might guess from every-day experiences with children (e.g., Cumming, 2003). For example, preschoolers can learn with little effort the names of new species, the names of the planets, and even the terms associated with material properties and chemical change (e.g., Fleer & Hardy, 1993). However, educators sometimes worry that children's learning of facts is no more than passive rote memorization, far from reflecting 'truly understanding' the facts. At the crux of this concern is that young children might not be able to go beyond mere facts to interconnect them under a common concept. Even though there is evidence of spontaneous abstractions in young children (e.g., Hickling & Gelman 1995; Hickling &

Wellman, 2001), higher-order concepts pertinent to science knowledge might be too abstract for them. The more central question, therefore, is whether young children can learn abstract concepts.

Preschoolers Learning Science: Myth or Reality? 49

but also that they could understand object conservation. Even 5-year-old preschoolers can appreciate the idea that water, when invisible to the naked eye, is nevertheless still present

*Replacing Existing Beliefs.* Learning about a new science concept can be problematic, beyond the required abstract-reasoning skills. This is because in some cases, children's naïve ideas about the domain conflict with the pertinent science concept. The detrimental power of mistaken ideas has been recognized for decades, leading to extensive research into understanding both the nature of the misconceptions across ages and how they can be changed (e.g., see Ohlsson, 2011; Vosniadou, 2008, for an extensive discussion). Indeed, existing misconceptions appear to be very difficult to change (e.g., Anderson & Smith, l987; Gunstone, Champagne, & Klopfer, 1981; Hannust, & Kikas, 2007; Kloos & Somerville, 2001; Linn & Burbules, 1988; Schneps, 1987). In many instances, children prefer mistaken ideas over correct ideas, even after extensive training and even after shortcomings of mistaken ideas have been pointed out explicitly. Take for example findings with 5- to 7-year-olds who participated in an astronomy curriculum on the spherical properties of the earth (Hannust, & Kikas, 2007). The four-week curriculum involved hands-on mini-lessons designed to target several apparent contractions, for example why the earth is perceived to be flat, or why people living on the "down-side" of the earth do not fall off. Yet, despite this relatively extensive intervention, children's understanding did not change significantly over the course of the instruction. While their performance on a pretest was below chance (11% correct), it stayed low even after the lessons (15% correct). In fact, results show that children relied more heavily on their phenomenological experience after instruction than before (see

also Kloos & Van Orden, 2005 for similar counter effects of teaching interventions).

Given such resistance to change, one might speculate that a child's mistaken ideas are innate. But upon closer look into the nature of beliefs, it turns out that misconceptions arise when misleading pieces of information are more salient than pieces of information that are relevant to the particular science concept (cf., Kloos, Fisher, & Van Orden, 2010). Therefore, to change a child's mistaken ideas in a science domain, a pedagogical approach is needed that can change the salience of relevant compared to irrelevant pieces of information (i.e., increase the salience of science-relevant pieces of information). With such change in making relevant information salient, misconceptions might be avoided altogether. Indeed, children who have benefitted from focused instruction seem to harbor fewer misconceptions in later

A promising approach in this regard is the use of conceptual models, also known as conceptual schemas, mental models, or scientific models (e.g., Glynn & Duit, 1995; Kenyon, Schwarz, & Hug, 2008; Mayer, 1989, Penner, Giles, Lehrer, & Schauble, 1997; Smith, Snir, & Grosslight, 1992; Smith & Unger, 1997, for a review see Vosniadou, 2008). Conceptual models are abstract representations of a science phenomenon – external diagrams of some sort that children can internalize. Models do not represent the real world in its full degree of complexity. Instead, they are schematics of the real world, designed to highlight only a selected number of relations (the ones that are relevant to the science concept of interest),

in some form (Tytler & Peterson, 2000).

years at school (cf., Novak & Gowin, 1984.)

There is an interesting drawback when it comes to learning abstract concepts. Unlike what one would expect, findings show that overly detailed and richly embedded learning materials have a *negative* impact on children's ability to abstract underlying concepts (e.g., Goldstone & Sakamoto, 2003; Goldstone, & Son; 2005; Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008; Ratterman, Gentner, & DeLoache, 1990; Son, Smith, & Goldstone, 2008). For example, when the learning materials were colored shaped intricately, children had more difficulty discovering an abstract mathematical rule than when the materials were black-and-white simple shapes (Kaminski et al., 2008). When the shapes were such that they helped children intuit the rules, learning improved, but transfer to a new task nevertheless suffered, compared to using none-specific and generic shapes (see also DeLoache, 1995; Bassok & Holyoak, 1989; Mix, 1999; Ratterman & Gentner, 1998; Sloutsky, Kaminski, & Heckler, 2005; Uttal, Liu, & DeLoache, 1999; Uttal, Scudder, & DeLoache, 1997). Taken together, there seems to be a pronounced advantage of sparse contexts when learning abstract concepts. The advantage lies in minimizing distraction, undermining the possibility of forming mistaken ideas, and highlighting relevant pieces of information.

Of course, when it comes to young children, a motivational factor needs to be taken into account (cf., Mantzicopoulos, Patrick, & Samarapungavan 2008; Zembylas, 2008). A setting without rich details might fail to engage the child sufficiently to prompt learning. For example, a young child might not be inclined to explore objects unless they vary in color, shape, and texture in interesting ways. Therefore, to make abstract ideas accessible to young children, it might not be possible to strip the context of any unnecessary complexity. A different approach to instruction is needed, one that helps make abstract ideas visible to children, while, at the same time, retaining a richly detailed context. Such approach might require a pedagogy that bootstraps the understanding of abstract ideas, rather than waiting for young children to detect them by themselves. Findings show that such approach is indeed possible.

Take for example the abstract idea of object conservation, the idea that matter exists, even when it is not visible with the naked eye. To understand this concept, children have to ignore their phenomenological experience of an object's presence and therefore engage in abstract reasoning. Immersing children into a richly detailed environment might not make this abstract idea salient. On the other hand, providing children with the opportunity to reflect on guided explorations of material transformation improved their understanding of object conservation (Acher, Arca & Sanmarti, 2007). In particular, 7- to 8-year-olds were asked to observe possible changes in materials (e.g., stones, wood, water, metal) when they were trying to break them down, mix them in water, or burn them. After each manipulation, children were encouraged to draw the changes they observed in the materials. They also participated in group discussions designed to help them conceptualize their experiences. Findings show not only that children were able to express opinions and counter arguments, but also that they could understand object conservation. Even 5-year-old preschoolers can appreciate the idea that water, when invisible to the naked eye, is nevertheless still present in some form (Tytler & Peterson, 2000).

48 Current Topics in Children's Learning and Cognition

concepts.

indeed possible.

Wellman, 2001), higher-order concepts pertinent to science knowledge might be too abstract for them. The more central question, therefore, is whether young children can learn abstract

There is an interesting drawback when it comes to learning abstract concepts. Unlike what one would expect, findings show that overly detailed and richly embedded learning materials have a *negative* impact on children's ability to abstract underlying concepts (e.g., Goldstone & Sakamoto, 2003; Goldstone, & Son; 2005; Kaminski, Sloutsky, & Heckler, 2008; Ratterman, Gentner, & DeLoache, 1990; Son, Smith, & Goldstone, 2008). For example, when the learning materials were colored shaped intricately, children had more difficulty discovering an abstract mathematical rule than when the materials were black-and-white simple shapes (Kaminski et al., 2008). When the shapes were such that they helped children intuit the rules, learning improved, but transfer to a new task nevertheless suffered, compared to using none-specific and generic shapes (see also DeLoache, 1995; Bassok & Holyoak, 1989; Mix, 1999; Ratterman & Gentner, 1998; Sloutsky, Kaminski, & Heckler, 2005; Uttal, Liu, & DeLoache, 1999; Uttal, Scudder, & DeLoache, 1997). Taken together, there seems to be a pronounced advantage of sparse contexts when learning abstract concepts. The advantage lies in minimizing distraction, undermining the possibility of forming

Of course, when it comes to young children, a motivational factor needs to be taken into account (cf., Mantzicopoulos, Patrick, & Samarapungavan 2008; Zembylas, 2008). A setting without rich details might fail to engage the child sufficiently to prompt learning. For example, a young child might not be inclined to explore objects unless they vary in color, shape, and texture in interesting ways. Therefore, to make abstract ideas accessible to young children, it might not be possible to strip the context of any unnecessary complexity. A different approach to instruction is needed, one that helps make abstract ideas visible to children, while, at the same time, retaining a richly detailed context. Such approach might require a pedagogy that bootstraps the understanding of abstract ideas, rather than waiting for young children to detect them by themselves. Findings show that such approach is

Take for example the abstract idea of object conservation, the idea that matter exists, even when it is not visible with the naked eye. To understand this concept, children have to ignore their phenomenological experience of an object's presence and therefore engage in abstract reasoning. Immersing children into a richly detailed environment might not make this abstract idea salient. On the other hand, providing children with the opportunity to reflect on guided explorations of material transformation improved their understanding of object conservation (Acher, Arca & Sanmarti, 2007). In particular, 7- to 8-year-olds were asked to observe possible changes in materials (e.g., stones, wood, water, metal) when they were trying to break them down, mix them in water, or burn them. After each manipulation, children were encouraged to draw the changes they observed in the materials. They also participated in group discussions designed to help them conceptualize their experiences. Findings show not only that children were able to express opinions and counter arguments,

mistaken ideas, and highlighting relevant pieces of information.

*Replacing Existing Beliefs.* Learning about a new science concept can be problematic, beyond the required abstract-reasoning skills. This is because in some cases, children's naïve ideas about the domain conflict with the pertinent science concept. The detrimental power of mistaken ideas has been recognized for decades, leading to extensive research into understanding both the nature of the misconceptions across ages and how they can be changed (e.g., see Ohlsson, 2011; Vosniadou, 2008, for an extensive discussion). Indeed, existing misconceptions appear to be very difficult to change (e.g., Anderson & Smith, l987; Gunstone, Champagne, & Klopfer, 1981; Hannust, & Kikas, 2007; Kloos & Somerville, 2001; Linn & Burbules, 1988; Schneps, 1987). In many instances, children prefer mistaken ideas over correct ideas, even after extensive training and even after shortcomings of mistaken ideas have been pointed out explicitly. Take for example findings with 5- to 7-year-olds who participated in an astronomy curriculum on the spherical properties of the earth (Hannust, & Kikas, 2007). The four-week curriculum involved hands-on mini-lessons designed to target several apparent contractions, for example why the earth is perceived to be flat, or why people living on the "down-side" of the earth do not fall off. Yet, despite this relatively extensive intervention, children's understanding did not change significantly over the course of the instruction. While their performance on a pretest was below chance (11% correct), it stayed low even after the lessons (15% correct). In fact, results show that children relied more heavily on their phenomenological experience after instruction than before (see also Kloos & Van Orden, 2005 for similar counter effects of teaching interventions).

Given such resistance to change, one might speculate that a child's mistaken ideas are innate. But upon closer look into the nature of beliefs, it turns out that misconceptions arise when misleading pieces of information are more salient than pieces of information that are relevant to the particular science concept (cf., Kloos, Fisher, & Van Orden, 2010). Therefore, to change a child's mistaken ideas in a science domain, a pedagogical approach is needed that can change the salience of relevant compared to irrelevant pieces of information (i.e., increase the salience of science-relevant pieces of information). With such change in making relevant information salient, misconceptions might be avoided altogether. Indeed, children who have benefitted from focused instruction seem to harbor fewer misconceptions in later years at school (cf., Novak & Gowin, 1984.)

A promising approach in this regard is the use of conceptual models, also known as conceptual schemas, mental models, or scientific models (e.g., Glynn & Duit, 1995; Kenyon, Schwarz, & Hug, 2008; Mayer, 1989, Penner, Giles, Lehrer, & Schauble, 1997; Smith, Snir, & Grosslight, 1992; Smith & Unger, 1997, for a review see Vosniadou, 2008). Conceptual models are abstract representations of a science phenomenon – external diagrams of some sort that children can internalize. Models do not represent the real world in its full degree of complexity. Instead, they are schematics of the real world, designed to highlight only a selected number of relations (the ones that are relevant to the science concept of interest),

while downplaying other relations (ones that are less relevant or misleading). Importantly, models represent predictive and explanatory rules, thus making visible the components of science phenomenon that are difficult to be perceived on the basis of phenomenological experience alone. As such, they make relevant science facts salient, in effect decreasing the salience of irrelevant pieces of information.

Preschoolers Learning Science: Myth or Reality? 51

strongly depends on an instructional environment that makes abstract relations salient, allowing them to visualize the relations without getting distracted by irrelevant information in the immediate context. To put it more pointedly, the limits on a child's ability to learn abstract science concepts might be the limits of the instruction that is provided. Open questions pertain to the exact interplay between decontextualized and carefully simplified environments to maximize children's learning about science concepts and events directly related to their lives (e.g., food, weather, seasons, animals, vehicles, light, magnets, etc.).

The second aspect of science learning pertains to understanding the process by which science knowledge is generated. Rather than learning about established and accepted science facts and concepts, this aspect includes an understanding of how science facts are generated in the first place. This includes the ability to create settings that are sufficiently informative for science knowledge to be generated. And it includes the meta-cognitive understanding of how new information can change existing knowledge. It is important to note that the process of generating science concepts is in part affected by cultural norms. Norms pertain to constraints about what to count as an explanation of events (cf., Pearl, 2009), under what circumstances to abandon an existing theory (cf. Kuhn, 1996), or how to treat expected versus unexpected observations (cf., Popper, 1959). So far, these constraints have not been studied explicitly in the realm of early science learning. Instead, the emphasis is on understanding how children's everyday interactions with their environment can help

The question of children's ability to generate science knowledge through observations is debated heavily, both in cognitive development and in educational research. In cognitive development, the ongoing debate centers on the question of whether young children are at all capable of engaging in appropriate knowledge-generating activities. Such activities, referred to as *scientific reasoning*, require the child to detect gaps in their existing knowledge base, ask questions in response to the identified gaps, carry out the experiments that could lead to an answer, and critically evaluate the evidence (cf., Klahr, 2005). Each one of these steps can be difficult for children (and even for adults), for several reasons: First, the mind is biased towards perceiving order, making it difficult to perceive disorder, missing information, or gaps (cf., e.g., Quinn, Eimas, & Rosenkrantz, 1993). Second, the mind is biased towards confirming already existing beliefs, rather than questioning their shortcomings, making it difficult to spontaneously challenge existing beliefs (e.g., Schauble,

In contrast to the cognitive-development debate, educational research already presupposes the child's ability to generate science knowledge, following the theoretical bent of constructivism (cf., Olson, 1996). For example, it is generally accepted that children can engage in *inquiry*, the processes of wondering, questioning, exploring, investigating, discussing, reflecting, and formulating ideas and theories (e.g., Kuhn, 2010). Indeed,

**3. Can preschoolers learn to generate science knowledge?** 

children generate science knowledge (e.g., Zimmerman, 2000).

1990). Under this view, scientific reasoning has to be trained explicitly.

There are several studies that show the effectiveness of conceptual models in young children (e.g., Gobert & Buckley, 2000; Kenyon et al. 2008; Wiser & Smith, 2008; Baker, Haussmann, Kloos, & Fisher, 2011). An illustrative example uses the science domain of material density, a concept that is defined by the ratio of the two highly salient dimensions of mass and volume. Predictably, children often ignore density and use instead perceived heaviness of an object as the sole predictor of the object's buoyancy (e.g., Piaget & Inhelder, 1974; Kloos et al., 2010). To help children overcome this mistaken focus on an object's heaviness, a conceptual model of density was developed, also known as dot-per-box (e.g., Smith & Unger, 1997; Wiser & Smith, 2008). It involves a display in which the volume of an object is represented as a certain number of boxes, and mass is represented as number of dots inside the boxes. Thus, density is represented as the spacing between dots (the more crowded the dots, the more dense the material); and irrelevant variation of color, shape, and texture are omitted. Thus, density of the material is now similar in salience to that of mass or volume. Children indeed benefited from these abstract representations of density (for a discussion of these findings, see Wiser & Smith, 2008). Similar learning success was reported with 4- to 5 year-olds, whether children were recruited from Head Start preschools or from preschools serving upper middle class families (Baker et al., 2011).

Introducing conceptual models early on might have a positive effect on learning as children get older. Support for this claim comes from research in the domain of evaporation and condensation, another domain that is a notoriously difficult area of instruction in science (Kenyon et al., 2008). Children between 6 and 8 years of age underwent a multi-week training on evaporation and condensation, which included observing the evaporation and condensation in a soda bottle, drawing diagrams to capture the system through various moments in time, testing their models through experiments, using tools to measure the amount of water in the air, and revising their models as needed. Findings show that the instructed students significantly outperformed the uninstructed students in their understanding of relevant concepts. Importantly, when students began the formal study of science in Grade 7, instructed students improve in their understanding of concepts much faster than uninstructed students. Clearly, the students who were helped to form basic science concepts in early grades had developed an understanding of the domain that continued to facilitate their meaningful learning, further developing their understandings and reducing their misconceptions (for related discussions, see Muthukrishna, Carnine, Grossen, & Miller, 1993).

In sum, research-based evidence points in a clear direction when it comes to promoting an understanding of science concepts. Unlike what a Piagetian stage model of abstract reasoning might imply, young children are indeed able to learn abstract concepts early on, even when the concepts run counter to what children already believe. Their learning strongly depends on an instructional environment that makes abstract relations salient, allowing them to visualize the relations without getting distracted by irrelevant information in the immediate context. To put it more pointedly, the limits on a child's ability to learn abstract science concepts might be the limits of the instruction that is provided. Open questions pertain to the exact interplay between decontextualized and carefully simplified environments to maximize children's learning about science concepts and events directly related to their lives (e.g., food, weather, seasons, animals, vehicles, light, magnets, etc.).
