Young children’s acquisition of knowledge about the Earth: A longitudinal study

An Augmented Reality Environment for Astronomy Learning in Elementary Grades

“…As reported by Hannust and Kikas [20], for any learning, children need new terms, facts and explanations. Then, further knowledge had to be introduced in order to explain the phenomena.…”

“…More precisely, the program is focused on the solar system, earth motion, day/night cycle, seasonal changes, moon motion and moon phases. For fifteen years, a lot of studies have shown that children of various cultures have difficulties in understanding contemporary scientific explanations of elementary astronomic phenomena [6,19,20,29,39,44,45]. Astronomy is a field where the information collected by means of personal experience contradicts contemporary scientific theory [19].…”

“…If these knowledge are integrated and consistently used, children tend to reinterpret the new information in accordance with their preliminary models and to form new synthetic models instead of scientific ones [19,20,47]. As recommended by European and French institutions [14,16] and to make science learning more efficient [12,13,18,28], especially in astronomy [40,47] the following inquiry-based pedagogical principles [35] must be proposed: (1) explicitly talking about children's preliminary knowledge and exploring different ideas to make them become conscious of their understanding/expertise; (2) showing the inconsistencies between everyday and scientific explanations and their reasons; (3) making children become conscious of their entrenched beliefs in order to change them; (4) giving the new explanations verbally and allowing pupils time to consolidate their thinking; (5) facilitating debates and leaving enough time for discussions.…”

Finding the time: Exploring a new perspective on students’ perceptions of cosmological time and efforts to improve temporal frameworks in astronomy

“…In their work, Straatemeier and colleagues evaluated a larger sample size of children and concluded children's presuppositions are not strong enough to suggest children actually do construct mental models, rather the children's knowledge is more fragmented and inconsistent [43]. A longitudinal study by Hannust and Kikas [44] used open-ended questions and drawing tasks similar to Vosniadou and Brewer [16] to examine two and three year old children's knowledge of Earth over four years. Hannust and Kikas concluded, much like Straatemeier and colleagues, that there were few indications to suggest children did form mental models of Earth at this age.…”

“…Hannust and Kikas concluded, much like Straatemeier and colleagues, that there were few indications to suggest children did form mental models of Earth at this age. When we examine how learners might perceive Earth's place in time and space in the Universe, it is important for us to consider these aforementioned works that suggest astronomical knowledge appears to be both mental modellike at times and fragmented at others [16,38,[43][44][45].…”