Two Attainable Skills in Kindergarten : Testing reproducibility and robustness in an experiment

Estelle Blanquet (1) , Eric Picholle (2)

1 LACES - Laboratoire Cultures, Éducation, Sociétés
2 LPMC - Laboratoire de physique de la matière condensée

Basic elements of scientific methodology are presented as a frame of reference, and a tool to design and implement inquiry-based sequences to 64 Kindergarten teachers. Questionnaires show that teachers welcome the explicit presentation of these elements. Among these, primacy of experiment, reproducibility and robustness of an experiment are considered relevant and attainable skills for their 5-6 y.o. pupils. After implementing relevant IBSE sequences, a large majority of pupils are indeed convinced that changing the place of an experiment shouldn't modify its result, but don't grasp the interest of testing the reproducibility of an experiment with a different operator. They also appear able to properly identify and, to a certain teacher-dependant extend, to discuss the relevance of a parameter, and can be brought to test the robustness of an experiment. These results were obtained through semi-directive interviews of 68 children from 3 classes of " Grande section de maternelle " two weeks after they had hosted a workshop around an experimental sequence in a festive science event.

Mots clés: Early childhood education; inquiry oriented teaching; Nature of science

Domaines: Education

Estelle Blanquet, Eric Picholle. Two Attainable Skills in Kindergarten : Testing reproducibility and robustness in an experiment . 11th Conference of the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA), European Science Education Research Association (ESERA), Aug 2015, Helsinki, Finland. pp.2638-2644. ⟨hal-01352266⟩