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What is the best way to teach science to grade school children?

  • My preschooler is friends with an older neighbor kid who is very excited about science--it's his favorite subject in school.  He's always telling us what he learned, but it's usually science facts that are not correct.  For instance, that when we die, people's bodies cool down to the temperature of the surrounding air, but when amphibians die, the temperature of their bodies only goes down to halfway between what it was when they were alive and what the air temperature is (they did examine a dead frog at school, but I'm not sure why he thinks it was warm-blooded when alive).  I asked a teacher friend (not his teacher) and she said that current thinking is that grade school kids need to explore and construct their own scientific knowledge, that rote learning of facts doesn't prepare you to think like a scientist, and that it's okay if kids draw mistaken conclusions because this is part of the process, and working scientists believe things that turn out not to be true all the time.  Is this the best way to learn science?  I would love to hear from scientists who do research how they learned best in grade school and what prepared them for a career in science.

  • Answer:

    Provide a mix of facts and hand-on experience.  Correct errors.  The Socratic method leads students to knowledge by asking questions.  But it's hard to do well.  The danger is that the student may come to the wrong conclusion.  Correcting the conclusion without undermining confidence in the experimental method is tricky.  Leaving the student with the wrong idea is worse.  Some teachers just don't have the breadth of knowledge to see what is wrong with the experiment or the analysis.  Such teachers should present the facts using all the best presentation aids they can get. Even with the best teachers, the Socratic method covers less material in an hour than straight presentation of the facts.  So the optimum is a combination. Edit:  My answer is an opinion/recommendation.  I taught a Socratic physics lab class to college undergraduates but never in K-12. As I think more about this, I see the potential for involved parents to help the K-6 teachers who have to teach all subjects.

Ed Caruthers at Quora Visit the source

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Just before I start, I'm not a scientist yet. I'm coming to the end of my pre-university education so I think I have relevant hindsight to offer before I start my degree in Neuroscience.  I disagree that we should let children come to their own conclusions if they're incorrect, but I do agree that we should do more of teaching kids how to learn. The unfortunate truth is that a child could be slowed down and hindered by being allowed to form their own conclusions without correction. There's no doubting it's a tall order trying to get a new human up to speed with everything humans before them have figured out! Instead, I think we should design science education so that children still have to figure things out by themselves but are guided towards the right conclusions by using carefully planned experiments. For example, to illustrate that white light is composed of the entire visible spectrum, just give a child a prism and a torch. Tell them what the prism does and ask them to figure out what's happening. With a little time and perhaps hints if they're getting stuck, before you know it you've got a class full of little Isaac Newtons. The traditional method is to carry out an experiment, observe the results and then the teacher explains why we get these results. You write this down in your notebook and move onto the next thing. For me, this takes away the essence of science. Science is all about making discoveries, that's what inspires professionals to do it. If you let them carry out experiments but take away that element of discovery by explaining it away too quickly, you take away the driving force of experimental understanding. Throughout my education so far I have felt starved of meaningful practical experiments. I always look forward to progressing into the next year because I imagine that that's when you start doing real science. When you figure things out for yourself. It never turns out to be the case, but has nevertheless been my subconscious motive for studying science at a higher level. I'm now approaching the start of a degree in neuroscience, but it has taken a long time and a lot of hard work with little reward to get there. If we provided more opportunities for children to make their own little discoveries along the way, I think we'd have a lot more people realising the true beauty of what science has to offer.

Alex Revill

Experiments. Children that young of age love hands on work. This hypothesis is even proven regarding psychology with Sigmund Frued and Carl Jung.

Kayla Ponder

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