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Studies of the representations that students construct, within the framework of embodied cognition, have shown that perception, action and cognition are linked and are the basis of these representations. From this framework of analysis, this study attempted to identified the representations of 23 preschool students (ages four and five) of sound production, perception and propagation. In-depth interviews were conducted using hypothetical situations and experimental tasks. Three representations were identified. The first one shows a conception of sound centred on objects. Representation 2 also focuses on objects and their relationship with the subject, but it begins to attribute characteristics to the sound itself, and in representation 3, sound has more intrinsic characteristics that expand its possibilities of interacting with the subject and other objects. We conclude that the construction of representations of sound starts from perceptual elements and is linked to actions, although its complexity also shows that they incorporate characteristics that go beyond this corporal correlate.

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis to identify the reasoning processes and representations that preschool students develop about sound based on the inferential-representational approach. Participants were 18 preschool students between the ages of four and five attending three rural schools located in the Sierra Norte of Puebla, Mexico. Data were obtained through a 14 question semi-structured interview. From children’s answers to the formulated questions, an inferential analysis method was applied to identify intentionality, representation elements, sign-material expressions, representations, inferences, and coordination rules in students’ constructions. The results show that children build a basic set of epistemic tools to give meaning to their interpretations and can use them as surrogate reasoning to make inferences. This research constitutes the first approximation toward the understanding of preschool children’s reasoning forms with an inferential-representational approach and constitutes a new approach that puts forward new referents to analyze students of different ages. We consider that the described results and analysis have implications on science education at this educational level.

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En el presente trabajo se exponen las construcciones conceptuales que pueden hacer los estudiantes del preescolar sobre las nociones de luz y de sombras mediante la propuesta didáctica denominada Educación en Ciencias en Preescolar (educienpre), en la que se desarrollan secuencias didácticas y materiales, susceptibles de ser llevadas al aula en condiciones normales. Asimismo, se describen las características de la propuesta y se analizan dichas construcciones conceptuales en función de sus explicaciones y representaciones. Se efectúa una comparación con investigaciones previas sobre la formación de las sombras y se muestran las posibilidades de los niños del preescolar de alcanzar conceptualizaciones que, de forma natural, logran los de mayor edad. El análisis que se presenta de las acciones de los preescolares en diversas situaciones físicas brinda elementos de mayor profundidad para comprender la construcción de representaciones y nociones científicas que pudieran verse reflejadas en una enseñanza de las ciencias más adecuada para los niños pequeños.