Preschool Pathways to Science (Preps): Facilitating Scientific Ways of Thinking, Talking, Doing, and Understanding - Softcover

Gay Macdonald is Executive Director for Early Care and Education, Krieger Center, UCLA.

Moises Roman is Curriculum Coordinator for Early Care and Education, Krieger Center, UCLA.

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of Preschool Pathways to Science (PrePS™): Facilitating Scientific Ways of Thinking, Talking, Doing, and Understanding, by Rochel Gelman, Ph.D., Kimberly Brenneman, Ph.D., Gay Macdonald, M.A., & Moises Roman, B.A. Copyright© 2010 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

A PREVIEW OF PrePS™

PrePS encourages science-based learning through activities and experiences that allow children to explore big ideas in depth and to learn the practices and language of science. The program was designed to enhance the classroom experience for both teachers and children. Preschool teachers, directors, and cognitive researchers collaborated with the goal of fostering enthusiasm, fresh perspectives, and feelings of competence in the classroom. From the teacher's point of view, PrePS can ease the typical workload by encouraging collaboration and connecting daily lesson plans.

We are determined to feed the curiosity of young children and capitalize on their tendencies to actively explore their social and physical worlds. Therefore, PrePS makes a special effort to develop children's observational skills for purposes of obtaining information in a reliable way—through their own observations and explorations of the world but also through discussions with classmates and teachers and by engaging in simple experiments. The program also features teachers' support of children's tendencies to ask questions and make predictions about topics related to science. We want children to learn that a question might have more than one answer. Most important, PrePS is a program that places the development of scientific processes in the context of the need to develop connections between concepts and the related vocabulary across learning experiences throughout the year. Children are encouraged to draw connections between activities, ideas, and vocabulary; to link questions and solutions from one activity to another; and to understand and relate transformations and sequences that unfold over time, as in the case of plant and animal life cycles.

PrePS teachers connect learning experiences throughout the school year based on a key principle of learning: It is always easier to learn something that one already knows something about than to start from scratch (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Gelman & Lucariello, 2002; Resnick, 1987). This principle applies to all learners, especially young ones. For example, a 4-year-old boy went to a science program for young children at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. When asked what he learned at program, the child replied, "I learned when they evacuated a tube, things fell together." No amount of questioning elicited another answer. But later in middle school, the boy related what he learned in school that day by tying it to his memory from preschool: "Remember when I went to the Franklin Institute and we evacuated that tube? Well, now I know what that was all about." It is our hope that your students will learn enough to make comparable connections at a later point in their education. The goal is to put the children on relevant learning paths that will provide more and more relevant data for constructing coherent understandings.

PrePS allows teachers to systematically plan their curricula and set specific, attainable learning goals for their students. Teachers can guide children in organized investigations of the everyday world, thus promoting scientific skills such as observing, predicting, checking, measuring, comparing, recording, and explaining. Although subsequent chapters in this book provide examples of how we have introduced these activities, it is important to realize that PrePS is not a set curriculum with fixed units that must be taught in sequence, or a list of unrelated facts and terms that children must master. Rather, PrePS is an approach that relies on the natural curiosity and flexibility of preschool children and teachers.

When implementing PrePS, you will not be asked to prepare seat-work. You will not encounter a pushdown curriculum that is made up of bits and pieces of what is found in textbooks for much older students, nor will you be put in the position of simply teaching children to memorize facts and words. Programs that offer pushdown ideas for science activities often require that learners already have sophisticated levels of background knowledge. Although young children can observe such things as the shape of the moon, they cannot be expected to understand why the moon changes shape, its 28-day cycle, its effect on the tides, or why people would weigh less if they were on the moon.

With PrePS, you will be embedding appropriate key content and science practices across the curriculum. You will be able to take advantage of the fact that concepts do not stand alone, each separate from the other. In this way, you can build sequences of learning experiences that help children construct conceptually coherent domains of knowledge about particular science topics. For example, consider the concept of animal. Such a thing moves by itself, breathes, eats, reproduces, and grows. Many of the same terms can be applied to trees and other plants; however, plants cannot move around by themselves and do not obtain nourishment in the same way as animals. Even some 3-year-olds recognize this distinction (Gelman, 2003; Inagaki & Hatano, 2002). Preschool children are able to deal with abstract concepts, as we discuss further in Chapter 2. The examples presented throughout the book illustrate the deep interrelationship between concepts and their related verbal descriptions. Consider the word bat, which refers to two very different concepts: a nocturnal animal and a sports tool. The different interpretations lead to very different inferences. For example, if someone tells you, "The bat is made of wood," you could infer that it is long, rigid, and used to hit balls. You would not infer that it eats, has babies, flies at night, and has good hearing.

PrePS incorporates lessons learned from extensive research on the acquisition of organized knowledge, which is fostered when learners are offered 1) multiple examples of the content and tools of a domain and 2) repeated opportunities to use the practices of the domain (Brown & Campione, 1996; Dunbar & Fugelsang, 2005; Gelman, 1998). PrePS also takes advantage of preschoolers' propensity to repeat a given task until they are satisfied with their own level of performance. Box 1.1 provides a particularly compelling example of this internal motivation. SPONTANEOUS SELF-CORRECTION

Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Barbel Inhelder (1974) designed a study in which preschool- and elementary-age children were given multiple opportunities to balance various blocks on top of a metal rod. Children assumed that all the blocks balanced at their geometric center but soon discovered that some blocks violated this rule. As the session progressed, the children adjusted their balancing strategies, moving from guesswork and random trial-and-error methods to purposeful attempts to determine which side of the block provided the best balance point. PrePS draws from a key finding: Children kept trying different solutions, even when this meant giving up a working strategy for one that did not work as well at first. Children went beyond simply making blocks balance to trying to figure out a rule for balancing. It is noteworthy that children were able to use the same blocks over and over again. However, if the authors had not weighted blocks in odd ways, it is unlikely that the children would have been motivated to search for a particular kind of rule (e.g., how to balance the blocks that looked alike but had different insides).

Many children have a habit of counting...