Sound representations in preschool students /Las representaciones del sonido en estudiantes de educación preescolar

Abstract

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.

Preschool Children’s Reasoning about Sound from an Inferential-Representational Approach

“…The basic set of representations that work as epistemic tools (Table 3) also appear in previous research over other populations and environments in children within the same age range or older (up to 10-12 years), indicating that this basic set of tools endures through children's development and continues the generation of the same type of ideas, hypothesis, and conceptions, at least in the case of sound [4][5][6][8][9][10].…”

“…One of the changes in our way of conceiving children's reasoning has to do with the idea that cognition is the result of active manipulation, and therefore, action influences over perception, indicating that perception and action are inseparable [10,21,22]. When children are active participants, it is possible to observe more complex reasoning and understanding that are not necessarily expressed verbally, but rather through other resources such as gestures or the combination of gestures and tools [23,24].…”

“…An example of this is the study of sound ideas. Most works over this topic analyze ideas from high school and college students [2,3] and only a small set of works are focused on children under eight years [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. Table 1 presents a synthesis of some reported works.…”

“…Driver, Squires, Ruschworth and Wood-Robinson (1994) [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] Sound is produced by the actions that subjects make over objects.…”

Razonamiento de los estudiantes de preescolar sobre los fenómenos físicos

“…Algunos estudios representativos sobre fenómenos físicos son los de Gallegos-Cázares et al (2008; sobre el tema de la luz y los colores. Más recientes son los de Calderón-Canales et al (2019) y Gallegos-Cázares et al (2021) sobre el tema del sonido, así como el de Canedo y Gómez (2022) sobre modelos precursores sobre la flotación. Si bien hay algunos estudios sobre pensamiento crítico para el caso de las ciencias naturales que analizan procesos genéricos con gran diversidad de temas, en ellos no se analizan los modelos y representaciones que niños y niñas construyen para interpretar los fenómenos; por ejemplo, los trabajos de González (2016) y Ramírez (2019) que fomentan el desarrollo de procesos de indagación con actividades sobre electricidad, o bien, trabajos con docentes de preescolar para proporcionar un marco conceptual en temas de física (Olvera et al, 2018) y trabajos con docentes para el desarrollo de habilidades científicas (Nieto et al, 2021) con la finalidad de que comprendan mejor los procesos naturales.…”