Fostering thinking through science in the early years of schooling

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Fostering thinking through science inthe early years of schoolingGrady Venville a , Philip Adey b , Shirley Larkin b , Anne Robertson c

& Hammersmith Fulham ca Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin Universityof Technology, PO Box U1987, Perth 6845, Australia; e‐mail:[email protected] King's College, University of London, UKc Local Education Authority, London, UKPublished online: 03 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Grady Venville , Philip Adey , Shirley Larkin , Anne Robertson & HammersmithFulham (2003) Fostering thinking through science in the early years of schooling, InternationalJournal of Science Education, 25:11, 1313-1331, DOI: 10.1080/0950069032000052090

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International Journal of Science Education ISSN 0950–0963 print/ISSN 1464–5289 online © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltdhttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0950069032000052090

INT. J. SCI. EDUC., NOVEMBER 2003, VOL. 25, NO. 11, 1313–1331

RESEARCH REPORT

Fostering thinking through science in the early years ofschooling

Grady Venville, Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin Universityof Technology, PO Box U1987, Perth 6845, Australia; e-mail:[email protected]; Philip Adey and Shirley Larkin, King’sCollege, University of London, UK; Anne Robertson, Hammersmith andFulham Local Education Authority, London, UK

The purpose of this research was to investigate and describe concrete examples of Year 1 students engagedin good thinking and to generate assertions about the ways teachers can foster habits of good thinking throughscience. The research design was a multiple case study of 32 lessons, of which four are analysed in detail in thispaper. The results suggest that young children engaged in good thinking are likely to explain and demonstratetheir ideas and actions and to make suggestions for solving problems. Children engaged in good thinking also arelikely to highlight discrepancies, adopt new ideas, and work collaboratively. The results indicate that teacherscan foster habits of good thinking through science; first, by accepting difficulty as an integral part of the learningprocess, second, by encouraging children to explain and talk about their ideas and, finally, by creating anenvironment where thinking is a valued classroom process.

Introduction

As we begin the twenty-first century, rapid change is an accepted part of our society.Knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is becoming more complex and weare required to adapt as ideas swiftly become obsolete. A valuable skill in such anenvironment is the ability to think. Nisbet claimed that ‘before the century is out, nocurriculum will be regarded as acceptable unless it can be shown to make acontribution to the teaching of thinking’ (1993: 282). Although we now know thatthis is not the case, the idea of teaching thinking has become less a curiosity andmore an imperative to people throughout the various levels of the educationcommunity. At the school level, however, there have been few successful thinkingprogrammes implemented, particularly for younger children. Kuhn points out that‘teachers have been offered remarkably little in the way of concrete examples ofwhat these [thinking] skills are – what forms they take’ (1999: 17). This paper aimsto begin to address this problem by presenting research conducted in Year 1classrooms that were part of a programme of professional development andspecifically devised activities to foster thinking and accelerate cognitive develop-ment. The theme explored in this paper is how good thinking materializes,particularly in science, in the very early years of schooling. The qualitative datapresented focuses on the behaviour of the children and the way they interact with

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1314 G. VENVILLE ET AL.

their peers, their teacher and the activities to ascertain specific, concrete examplesof good thinking that could be applied to the teaching of science.

This qualitative examination of thinking was designed to complement aproject that investigated cognitive acceleration of 5-year-old and 6-year-oldchildren in 10 inner London primary schools. Cohen et al. (2000) advocate thecomplementarity of quantitative and qualitative methods in attempting to reachdeeper understanding of classroom processes. The materials of the project,including some theoretical introduction, are published as Let’s Think! (Adey et al.2001). This project was designed to accelerate cognitive development in Year 1students through an intervention of science and mathematics-based thinkingactivities that promoted cognitive conflict and encouraged social construction andmetacognition. This research project was given the name ‘CASE@KS1’, anacronym for Cognitive Acceleration Through Science Education at Key StageOne. A quantitative element of the project involved a quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test design with experimental (n = 300) and matched control groups (n =170). The experimental group overall made significantly greater gains in cognitivedevelopment over the period of the experiment than the controls, in both direct(effect size = 0.47) and transfer (effect size = 0.43) tests (Adey et al. 2002).There was no interaction with various social and linguistic variables (Adey et al.2002).

This paper describes a qualitative exploration of the notion of good thinkingwithin the context of the whole project. A general assumption of this study was thatthe intervention activities were more likely to provide an environment conducive togood thinking than regular Year 1 lessons. This assumption was based on thequantitative results of the project that showed that the intervention programme hada significant, immediate effect on the rate of children’s cognitive development (Adeyet al. 2002).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which the interventiondid, indeed, provide an environment that demonstrated good thinking behaviours inYear 1 students. A qualitative approach to data collection was used for this study toilluminate how thinking behaviours manifested in the Year 1 classroom and toexplore how they are different from ‘common’ practice. The qualitative datacollection was used to provide fine grain, detailed descriptions of classroombehaviours (Cohen et al. 2000) to generate more general assertions about waysteachers can foster habits of good thinking through science in the early years ofschooling. More specifically, the research questions were:

� What are the elements of good thinking that occur in the interventionlessons?

� How are the thinking behaviours of students in the intervention lessonsdifferent from those encountered in regular lessons?

� Do the thinking behaviours of students in the intervention lessons showpotential for enhanced cognitive development?

� What are the critical features of lessons that teachers should encourage, inorder to foster good thinking through science?

What is thinking? Hamers and Csapo point to the nature–nurture debate onthinking, where there are ongoing arguments about whether intelligence is inheritedor acquired. They define intelligence as, ‘a person’s “rough” intellectual power, andthinking as the “skilled” use of that power’ (1999: 25). This definition indicates that

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THINKING THROUGH SCIENCE IN THE EARLY YEARS 1315

thinking can be taught or trained and that improvement in thinking can realize thegreater intellectual potential of a person. The links between teaching thinking inscience and enhanced academic achievement in science and other curriculum areashave been well established (Adey and Shayer 1994, McGuinness 1999, Nisbet1993). Good thinking can therefore be considered as the process that results in animprovement in a person’s intellectual power.

There is a significant body of research about the teaching of thinking (for areview, see McGuinness 1999). For example, Tishman et al. claim that ‘goodthinkers are disposed to explore, to question, to probe new areas, to seek clarity, tothink critically and carefully, to consider different perspectives, to organise theirthinking’ (1995: 42). These ideas have been investigated in secondary and upperprimary classrooms (Adey and Shayer 1994, Feurerstein et al. 1980, Fisher 1998,Hamers and Overtoom 1997, Hamers et al. 1999, Lipman 1991) but there is littleclassroom-based research that investigates thinking in the very early years of formaleducation. The significance of this study is that it provides early childhood teacherswith concrete examples of behaviours that, if encouraged in the classroom, are likelyto foster habits of good thinking that are applicable not only in science, but across thecurriculum.

The theoretical underpinnings of this study embrace notions from two major,but complementary, theoretical perspectives of child development, those of Piagetand of Vygotsky (Tryphon and Voneche 1996). Piaget’s broad theoreticalprinciples describe children as actively constructing their own developmentthrough interactions with the environment. Children are qualitatively differentthinkers from adults and do not simply have a smaller capacity for thinking (Lightet al. 1991). Development is described by Piaget as involving progression throughfour main stages, sensori-motor, pre-operations, concrete operations and formaloperations. Children between the ages of about 4 and 8 years undergo a majorchange in their way of thinking from the pre-operational stage, during whichcognition is based on action, to the stage of concrete operations, during whichcognition is based on the symbolic understanding of concrete objects and therelations between them (Piaget and Inhelder 1974, 1976). Piaget’s stage theory ofdevelopment has been challenged from several fronts (for example, Donaldson1978) that question the notion of limits in children’s capacity for reasoning andabstract thinking. Such challenges are consistent with the notion that thinking canbe taught and that it is possible to compensate for lack of experience. Never-theless, the extensive work done with children by Piaget, his followers and critics(for an overview, see Goswami 1998) provides a rich source of information aboutthe characteristics of children’s thinking, as well as offering challenging activitiesand problems for children of this age that provide a rich context for good thinkingand cognitive development.

The intervention activities that provided a context for this study were developedwithin several of the schema of concrete operations described by Piaget andInhelder, and employ notions of concrete preparation, construction, cognitiveconflict, metacognition and bridging (Adey and Shayer 1994, Adey et al. 2001).Piagetian theory embraces the idea that social context supports and enhancesmeaning making and problem-solving but, ultimately, they occur within the mindsof individuals. Vygotsky’s social construction theory emphasizes the social contextover the individual, and contends that knowledge is constructed socially prior tobeing internalized and used independently by children. Vygotsky (1978) asserted

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that children’s development can be fostered both by adults and by more competentpeers when working in the ‘zone of proximal development.’ The zone of proximaldevelopment is an area just beyond the students’ current understanding, ‘a dynamicregion of sensitivity to learning experiences in which children develop, guided bysocial interaction’ (Rogoff 1991: 68). In terms of ideal conditions for enhancedthinking, research from Vygotsky’s perspective suggests it is critical that childrenverbalize their reasoning and accept reasoning at a higher level than they started outwith. Furthermore, the more children are involved in tasks as a joint endeavour andcome to shared understandings, the more likely it seems that they will learn(O’Donnell and King 1999).

Vygotsky argued that social interaction was important for children’s develop-ment from birth, whereas Piaget, in contrast, argued that the greatest benefits ofpeer collaboration would be achieved when children had reached the concreteoperational stage (Hogan and Tudge 1999). Research has been inconclusive on thisissue. In this study, a social environment was used as the context for theinvestigation of thinking even though many of the children at the ages of 5 and 6were still likely to be thinking predominantly in pre-operational ways.

The context

The data presented in this paper were collected from a total of 11 Year 1 classes inan inner London education borough. In seven of those classes the teachers hadimplemented intervention activities on thinking and participated in a professionaldevelopment programme related to the CASE@KS1 project. The remaining fourclasses were from the same education borough and acted as control classes for thequantitative CASE@KS1 study. The teachers from these control classes had notimplemented the thinking activities or participated in the professional developmentprogramme. None of the participating teachers, intervention or control, werevolunteers. The teachers were required by the authority within the educationborough to participate in the research project as part of their teaching duties. All ofthe teachers, however, were amenable to the research and accommodating of theresearchers. A typical Year 1 (the first year of compulsory education in the UKsystem, when children are aged 5 years) class of 30 children in this borough willinclude a diverse cultural mix of children whose families originated from many partsof the world, particularly Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe, withthose who have been English for tens of generations. Many of the students live inhigh-density housing provided by the local council. The Year 1 teachers weregenerally young and relatively inexperienced, only two of the 11 teachers in thisstudy had more than 4 years’ experience. This is a result of the high turnover ofteachers in these schools each year.

The intervention activities

The activities from the CASE@KS1 research project provided the context for thisstudy of thinking in Year 1. Each activity takes about 30 or 40 minutes and isconducted by the teacher with a group of five or six children. The other children inthe class are given work to do independently, as individuals or as groups. This workwas often ‘task board’ work in which children of this age often participate. The classis divided into groups and each group has a task, for example, completing a collage,

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participating in mathematics games, reading books or writing a story. Each day ofthe week the tasks are rotated through the groups. The CASE@KS1 activity thenbecomes part of the task board ‘circuit’; the only difference from a regular class isthat the teacher works exclusively with the children doing the CASE@KS1 activity,and the other students, once they understand what they are doing, are encouragedto work independently or ask the teacher’s assistant (if there is one) if they needhelp. The typical Year 1 class has about 30 children, which means the activity isrepeated about five times by the teacher with each of the groups of children in herclass. A central core of 30 activities were trialled by researchers and teachers (Adeyet al. 2001) so there is approximately one intervention lesson for each week of theschool year.

The teachers found working with one small group of children for 30 minuteseach day to be valuable in several ways. They said they were better able tounderstand their children when they spent extended periods observing and workingwith them rather than circulating from group to group. They also commented thatthe children learnt to work independently much quicker than usual because of thisapproach. The quantitative results from the CASE@KS1 project (Adey et al. 2002)showed that the intervention benefited those children with poor English as much asit did children with regular English speaking skills. This London borough also hadan extensive English as a second language programme, and these children weresupported in a number of ways including the presence of support teachers in theclassroom when necessary. One of these support teachers commented that theintervention activities actually helped these children with their spoken Englishbecause there is so much opportunity for the students to speak. The activities alsodo not require any reading or writing and therefore did not disadvantage thechildren with poor English reading and writing skills. We have a lot of anecdotalevidence from teachers involved in the study that suggests very quiet children, whorarely speak in whole class sessions, often contributed worthwhile ideas during theintervention activities.

Development of the activities was based on the theoretical constructs ofcognitive conflict, social construction, and metacognition that had previously beendeveloped for a cognitive acceleration project with 12-year-old to 14-year-oldstudents (Adey and Shayer 1994). For that work, schema described by Inhelder andPiaget (1958) as characteristic of formal operations provided the contextualframework. The relevance of these schema, which included control and exclusion ofvariables, ratio and proportionality, equilibrium, probability, and abstract (formal)modelling, to the science curriculum was obvious. For the new CASE@KS1 workwith 5 and 6 year olds, such formal schema were clearly inappropriate and weturned therefore to the schema described by Piaget and Inhelder as characteristic ofconcrete operations. It was judged that most of the children at this age would be inthe transition from pre-operational thought to concrete operations, and thus theconcrete schema would offer the right framework to provide challenging activities,being just beyond their current capabilities. A ‘schema’ can be thought of as ageneral way of thinking that may be applied to a wide variety of specific contexts. Ifchildren did not develop schema, they would be condemned to working outsolutions to problems anew in every new context encountered.

Examples of concrete schema include seriation (ordering), classification, pointsof view, causality, and concrete modelling (Piaget 1930, Piaget and Inhelder 1974,1976). These can be seen as fundamental to scientific (and to mathematical)

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thinking and all early science curriculum activities can be analysed in terms of theconcrete schema that they require. For example, to compare the relativeabsorbencies of different papers involves putting them in an order – seriating them.Elementary work on living and non-living things requires them to be put into groupswith some characteristics in common; that is, to classify them. Understanding of theEarth as a sphere on which we live, and its relationship with the moon and sun, allrequire a sophisticated development of perspective-taking – points of view. It ishardly surprising that such understanding does not develop until late in the stage ofconcrete operations (Vosniadou and Brewer 1992). Causality is, of course, at theheart of scientific investigation. Any true experiment is an intervention in a situationin order to confirm or exclude a supposed cause (e.g. the presence of soil) for aneffect (on healthy plant growth). Concrete modelling is the building of simpletheoretical models that offer an explanation for observations. In concrete models,each element in the model has a specific concrete referent in reality. For example,a concrete model of magnetism might include the constructs of ‘poles’, of a ‘field’(visualized as a pattern of iron filings on a sheet of paper) and of ‘strength’(operationalized as the number of paperclips that can be lifted).

It should not be supposed that at Year 1 the CASE@KS1 project wasattempting to introduce these particular examples of scientific content. What we areillustrating here is that early work on the concrete schema, even in very simplecontexts such as seriating a set of 10 sticks according to length or classifying shapesof different colours and sizes, has a direct bearing on the later development ofeffective scientific thinking. The CASE@KS1 intervention included severalactivities based on each of the schema; for example, the seriation schema underlayan activity on ordering sticks, the seriation of flowers of different length, seriation ofboxes of different size and weight, and seriation of irregular stones. The latterexamples require children to consider more than one dimension of the objects.

The aspects of the cognitive acceleration theory that the teachers areencouraged to promote during the activities are referred to as ‘pillars’: concretepreparation, cognitive challenge, social construction, metacognition and bridging.The explicit linking of theory to practice through the pillars distinguishes thisintervention from other Piagetian-based activities popular during the 1960s and1970s. The pillars provide clear guidance to practitioners and criteria by which theycan judge their own and other’s practice.

All activities begin with concrete preparation where the students and teachernegotiate common language for the materials to be used and establish familiaritywith the situation in which the task will be set. Cognitive challenge is anotherimportant aspect of each intervention activity. A situation that causes dissonance inthe students’ mind is created so that they are challenged to think of possiblesolutions beyond what they already know. Students are challenged in various waysdepending on the schema in which the task has been developed. For example, in oneof the activities from the classification schema the children are given a group ofmulticoloured farmyard animals and asked to group animals of the same kindtogether. Children of this age often group animals saying they are ‘friends’ or‘mummies and daddies’, the difficulty being the use of a distinct, definablecriterion. The consistent use of a clearly identified criterion is the thinking skill thatis being fostered through this activity. If the children in the group easily achieve thisskill they are challenged at a higher level to use a second criterion. Changing fromone criterion to another is very difficult for many young children. They also can be

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challenged further to construct a grid pattern using two pieces of information abouteach animal; its colour and type. The teacher must constantly monitor the children’sthinking skills to be able to challenge them at an appropriate level.

When the concrete preparation has been completed and the cognitive challengeof the activity established, the teacher’s role becomes that of a facilitator. Theteacher encourages social construction by asking the children to verbalize theirthinking, explore many solutions to the task at hand, to co-operate, listen andcritique ideas and agree on a common solution if possible. The finding of asatisfactory solution to the task is satisfying for the students; however, it is theprocess that is important, and it is not always necessary that a solution is found. Theteacher encourages the children to reflect on the process of the activity in ametacognitive way by asking questions about how they solved the problem, or whathelped them to think of the things that they did. A final, but important, aspect ofeach intervention activity is bridging or application of the cognitive skill to adifferent problem or context. This can be done within one activity or between twoor more activities or between intervention activities and other classroom lessons.For example, if the group of children have difficulty putting a group of irregularstones in some kind of order, the teacher might ask the children to reflect onstrategies they used to help them put sticks of different length in order in a previousactivity.

Professional development

The intervention activities provided the vehicle through which teachers were able toimplement the theory, but the implementation depended critically on theprofessional development programme. The professional development for theteachers consisted of 9 days out of class as well as a number of in-classdemonstrations and coaching sessions, which have been identified by Joyce andShowers (1995) as essential in effective professional development. The out-of-classprofessional development days were used to: (1) familiarize the teachers with theactivities, (2) explore the underlying theory of cognitive acceleration and relate thatto the teachers’ practice, (3) develop mutual support and professional camaraderie,(4) support the teachers with general management and teaching issues related to theimplementation of the activities, and (5) to gather feedback about the activities.

Design and procedure

This study was designed to articulate with and enhance the validity and reliability ofthe complementary quasi-experimental study of the effects of the CASE@KS1project (Adey et al. 2002). Merriam (1988) acknowledges that the combination ofqualitative and quantitative measures is a form of triangulation that enhances rigour.Qualitative data collection methods were used for this study in order to gain an in-depth and contextualized description and understanding of Year 1 students engagedin thinking (Lincoln and Guba 2000). The research design was a multiple case study(Yin 1994) of both experimental and control lessons. A lesson was considered to be adiscrete session of work that usually lasted between 30 minutes and 1 hour (Stake2000). A multiple case study design was used for this study as a form of triangulationto enhance the validity of the results by verifying the repeatability of theinterpretations while at the same time acknowledging no perfect repeatability (Stake

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2000). The strategy of inquiry was observation at two levels, general and focussed(Angrosino and Mays de Perez 2000). At any one time, one of the three researcherswas present in the classrooms during data collection in a capacity that can bedescribed as ‘non-participant participant observation’ (Wolcott 1999: 48). Eachresearcher was visible in the classroom and known by the teacher and the children;however, his/her role as classroom participant was subordinate to the role as observer.The three phases of the research are now outlined.

Phase 1: general observation

The thinking activities were trialled over a 7-month period. The researchersindependently visited each of the classes several times during the trialling period toobserve the teachers’ delivery of the activities, the students’ responses to the activitiesand their interaction with the teacher and the other children. Field notes were takenduring all observations. This general observation played a significant role in theresearchers developing their ideas about the focus of this study; that is, the kind ofbehaviours the children were involved in that demonstrated good thinking. A list ofpreliminary behaviours that the researchers felt were important in helping thestudents to think in appropriate ways in order to solve the problems and tasks posedby the thinking activities were identified.

Phase 2: focused classroom observation

The 11 teachers involved in this study were formally observed two or three timesduring a 6-month period when the intervention activities had been fullyimplemented. A total of 32 lessons were included in the analysis: 17 interventionlessons and 15 control lessons. The intervention lessons were based on the schema ofclassification, seriation (ordering) and points of view. The control lessons consisted ofmathematics and science lessons and one history lesson, and provided data for thepurpose of general comparison of the kind of thinking and behaviours that happenedwith intervention lessons. Detailed field notes were taken during all lessons with theguiding framework of the preliminary list of behaviours generated from the first phaseof the observation. All field notes were typed and returned to the teachers forverification. The observation notes from control classes were returned to the teachersat the end of the experimental year so that the feedback did not influence theirteaching during the data collection period of the quasi-experimental study.

Phase 3: analysis and generating assertions

Preliminary analysis by the researchers during typing and reading of the lessontranscripts resulted in more detailed descriptions of the list of behaviours andincluded specific examples. The descriptions of the behaviours were used by threeresearchers to code one lesson transcript. After this procedure, the three researchersmet for discussion and the feedback resulted in some of the behaviours beingcoalesced into broader groupings. This re-grouping resulted in a final set of sevenbehaviours that were coded from A to G and were described with examples. Theprincipal researcher then coded all the lesson transcripts and the frequency of thebehaviours in each of the lessons and the averages for the intervention and controllessons calculated. Examples of the coding are included in the findings so that thereader can trace the coding process (Guba and Lincoln 1994). The results from the

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coding are simply used to present a broad picture of the differences betweenintervention and control lessons. The results were presented to the teachers, anddiscussion and feedback were used for further verification. The case study transcriptswere re-read and four excerpts, two intervention and two control, were chosen forpresentation and detailed analysis in this paper. The criterion by which these excerptswere chosen was that they showed close to average frequency and patterns ofbehaviours as established through the analysis of all the lessons. The excerpts wereedited to improve readability. Speech in quotation marks are approximations that areas accurate as possible from the field notes. The results were utilized to generateassertions about how teachers can foster good thinking in Year 1.

Findings

The seven broad categories of behaviour that the Year 1 children demonstrated whileparticipating in an intervention lesson included explaining, highlighting discrep-ancies, adopting new ideas, demonstrating, thinking and working collaboratively,

Table 1. Categories of thinking behaviours.

Category Description

(A) Explains A child explains:� his/her idea/action� another child’s idea/action� his/her idea for solving a problem� his/her/another child’s misunderstanding/difficulty

(B) Highlightsdiscrepancy

A child:� recognizes/points out his/her own/the group’s/another

child’s difficulty� disagrees with another child/the teacher� accepts another child/the teacher has different ideas

(C) Adopts a new idea A child adopts a new idea to:� a better/agreed one when his/her original idea was

articulated/shown� a better/agreed one when no clear original idea was

articulated/shown

(D) Demonstrates A child demonstrates an appropriate action or his/her idea toother children or teacher

(E) Thinks/workscollaboratively

� children make various suggestions about solving aproblem

� children build on each other’s ideas or use severalsources of information to solve a problem

� children agree a problem is not solvable

(F) Ask questions A child asks questions of the teacher or another child to clarifytask/activity/problem/ideas

(G) Other usefulstrategies

A child may use other thinking behaviours such as:� creating analogies with ideas from a different context or

example� using a physical strategy to organize his/her thinking

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asking questions, and other useful strategies such as creating analogies. Briefdescriptions of these categories are provided in table 1. The relative frequency withwhich these behaviours occurred in intervention lessons and control lessons isdocumented in table 2. The occurrence of a behaviour was scored when there wasdirect evidence in the lesson transcript that a child had performed one of thebehaviours. For example, if a child explained their idea for a solution to a problem,this was counted as one occurrence of explaining. Table 2 compares interventionlessons that were implemented entirely in small groups with control lessons thatwere implemented as a mixture of whole class and small group approaches. It isimportant to note that part of the differences in numbers may relate to the greateropportunity to allow group discussion and collaborative problem-solving that isafforded by small groups. Four excerpts from classroom field notes are nowprovided in these findings. Two are from intervention lessons (excerpts 1 and 2) andtwo are from control lessons (excerpts 3 and 4).

Excerpt 1: the green Tyrannosaurus rex

This excerpt was taken from the transcript of an intervention lesson taught by MsGwalia.1 The children were challenged to sort a mixture of toy dinosaurs into twohoops, one containing green dinosaurs and one containing Tyrannosaurus rex (T.rex). The difficulty was that one dinosaur was both green and a T. rex.

Ms Gwalia set the task by asking the students to put the green dinosaurs in one hoop andthe T. rex in the other hoop. The students set to work and sorted the dinosaurs into thecorrect groups. The green T. rex was in the group of green dinosaurs and not with the otherT. rex. Ms Gwalia went over the initial instructions to put green dinosaurs in one group andthe T. rex in the other group and asked, ‘do you all agree that is what you have done?’ Serenpointed to the green T. rex in the green group and said, ‘I want that one in the T. rex group.’(B)2 Ms Gwalia asked whether it was all right for the T. rex to be in the green group. Melissasaid, ‘yes, but Seren wants it in the T. rex group.’ Sam said he wanted it in the green group,‘because it’s the same colour.’ (A) Tiffany said she wanted it in the T. rex group in such adecisive way that all the students agreed with her. Joshua was the only student who stillasserted that it should go in the green group.

Ms Gwalia pointed out that there was a ‘big problem’ because the students clearly disagreedabout where the green T. rex should go and they did not have a solution that suited everyone.

Table 2. Average occurrence of thinking behaviours in intervention andcontrol lessons.

Category

Average occurrence inintervention lessons

(n = 17)

Average occurrence incontrol lessons

(n = 15)

(A) Explains 28 6.9(B) Highlights discrepancy 4.7 1.4(C) Adopts a new idea 3.1 0.1(D) Demonstrates 4.6 1(E) Thinks/works collaboratively 1.6 0.5(F) Ask questions 0.7 1.4(G) Other useful strategies 0.2 0

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She asked them, ‘how can we solve this problem?’

Joshua suggested getting another green T. rex and putting it in the other group, ‘so that eachgroup would have a green T. rex.’ (A) Ms Gwalia replied that, ‘we haven’t got another one,so what can we do? How can we solve the problem?’ Sam tried to solve the problem byisolating the green T. rex on the side of the table outside both of the hoops. (D) Ms Gwaliaexplained that the dinosaurs on the outside were all not green and not T. rex and thereforethe problem dinosaur didn’t belong outside the hoops. Seren picked up the green T. rex andhad a close look at it as the discussion continued. Ms Gwalia pointed to the two groups andasked, ‘how can it be part of this and part of this?’ Melissa suggested a vote. (A) Ms Gwaliasaid, ‘a good idea, but it won’t solve the problem.’ Seren proposed that the T. rex wanted tobe with his family, pointing to the other T. rex. (A) Ms Gwalia pointed out, ‘but he’s greentoo.’

Seren put his hands up to his head and said, ‘let me think!’ (G) Ms Gwalia added, ‘youmight all need to put on your thinking caps.’ Melissa suggested putting the green dinosaurin the middle of the two hoops, ‘it could go in the middle,’ (A) and the students put it in thegap between the two hoops. (D) Ms Gwalia asked whether it is actually in the hoops if theyput it in the middle? The students chorused ‘no.’ Melissa said, ‘put it in both of them!’ (A)Ms Gwalia talked about inside the circle and reminded the students about the story they hadread earlier about Sita inside the circle. She pointed out that the dinosaur was not inside thehoop and asked the students, ‘how can it be in both?’ Jade said, ‘you have to put them bothtogether like that! and make it stay in the middle and make it think!’ She pulled the twohoops so they were just touching and put the dinosaur over the edges of both hoops todemonstrate her idea. (AD) Seren suggested overlapping the hoops so that the animal is inboth groups and showed the students how to do it. (ADE) Jade said, ‘it’s inside both groups.’(A) Ms Gwalia asked Jade what she was thinking when she solved the problem. Jade replied,‘I was thinking if I get them together it will be in both of them.’ (A)

Excerpt 2: living things

This excerpt was taken from the transcript of an intervention lesson taught by MsPartridge. She had asked the group of students to put 24 pictures cards into twopiles, living things and not living things.

The students set about the task. Some of them started working individually, instead of as agroup and the teacher stopped them after a while and asked Tristan what he was doing. Hehad the pictures of a starfish, snail and dragon fly. The teacher asked him why they weretogether. Tristan said because they are living. (A) Alham had pictures of the cheese, salt,mushroom and coal. The teacher asked him why they were together. Alham said they are notalive. (A) The teacher asked everyone, ‘are you happy with that?’ and pointed to themushroom. Unis said it lives in the garden. (A) Pernell said it lives in the garden and you putwater on it and it will grow. (A) Alham agreed and said it should go in the living group andput the mushroom in the pile of living things. (C) The students then focussed on the pictureof the jumper and they all agreed that it’s not living. (E)

The students looked at the picture of a train. Alexandra said she didn’t know what it is. (B)Tristan helped her by saying it’s a train. (A) Pernell said it’s not living because people are init. (A) Alham said it’s not alive because it doesn’t grow. (A) Unis said it doesn’t have a home(A) and they put it in the not living pile of cards.

Unis put the pictures of the feathers and leaves in the not living group but said he’s not surewhere they should go. (B) Alham said he is unsure about the seaweed. (B) Tristan said it’sliving because it lives under the sea. (A) The teacher asked what does it do so you know it’sliving? Pernell said mermaids go in it and it floats. (A) Alham said ‘I think it’s living’ and putthe seaweed in the living group. Unis said the octopus is living because it’s got an eye andit can slap someone. (A)

The students then looked at the picture of the sun. Alham said it lives in the sky. (A) Unissaid it’s not living because the sky isn’t a place where you live. (B) Pernell said it comes up

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at day and down at night. (A) Tristan talked about going down and up and how windy it is.(A) The teacher then asked, does the sun grow? The students said, ‘no’. The teacher askeddoes it have babies? The students chorused, ‘no’. The teacher asked does it breathe? Thestudents said, ‘no.’ Finally she asked, ‘Is it living?’ and the students chorused, ‘no’.

All the cards were now correctly classified as living or not living things.

Excerpt 3: a plant’s life cycle

This excerpt was taken from the transcript of a control science lesson about the lifecycle of plants. Initially, Ms Brown reviewed the aims for the lesson that wereprinted on the white board by asking two students to read them out loud. She saidthat the two words, ‘life cycle’ were new and asked the children what these wordsmean.

Molly: It’s about plants growing. (A)Steve: It’s when something, when they are alive and their cycle. (A)Jasmine: Growing. (A)Ms Brown Good, I’ll give you a clue. It’s from the beginning to the end of its life. Like this

table, where did it come from? From the beginning to the end.

[Ms Brown showed a chart with a sequence of pictures from a seed, a tree, a tree cut downand a table.]

Ms Brown: It starts off as a seed but ends up being the whole plant. I asked Mrs Patel forthe drawing because she is the science coordinator.

[Ms Brown wrote ‘The Life Cycle of a Seed’ on the white board.]

Ms Brown: What does it begin with?Student: A seed.Ms Brown: Good. [She drew a seed on the white board] You are going to copy this into your

book. Green group, think about your broad beans, what happens next?Student: A big long green thing comes out. (A)Ms Brown: What’s it called?Student: Stem.Ms Brown: Excellent, but that comes next, what’s it called?Olivia: Root, a sprout.Ms Brown: Excellent [drew on board]. It sprouts its roots that will hold it down in the

soil.Student: Is that part going to turn into a flower [points to seed]? (F)Ms Brown: You’ll see. What was the bit you said before, the stem, that’s it. The stem comes

up and we call it a shoot. Has anyone seen a shoot on any of our plants?Students: Yes and No responses.Ms Brown: Where is the seed?Student: In the soil.Ms Brown: Yes, the shoot comes out of the seed. The next bit is when we really start to get

something that looks like a plant, big root, long stem, lots of leaves and then inthe last one we get a flower. [Ms Brown completed the diagram of a plant lifecycle on the white board]. Okay I want you to copy the life cycle of a seed.

[The students then went to their desks to complete the picture in their science work-books.]

Excerpt 4: a dog’s day

This excerpt was taken from the transcript of a control lesson, taught by MsGriffiths, about putting things in order.

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Ms Griffiths talked about the order of the school day and explained that everyone’s day goesin order. She showed the students a worksheet and explained that, ‘on the sheet is a dog andyou’re going to put his day in order and you’re going to make a nice book and colour it in.’Ms Griffiths asked Vanessa what the dog is doing in one of the pictures. Vanessa didn’tanswer and Ms Griffiths helped her by saying, ‘he’s eating his breakfast.’ Ms Griffiths thenasked the students what the dog is doing in the other pictures, sometimes the studentscouldn’t answer so Ms Griffiths went to another student until she got the answers.

Ms Griffiths wrote the six things the dog in the worksheet was doing on the board:

1. Asleep in bed, 2. Waking up, 3. Yawning, 4. In the shower, 5. Eating breakfast, 6. Goesout.

She then encouraged the children to be quiet by saying, ‘if you listen you can hear the tapdrip and when you do this sheet I want to be able to hear that tap drip.’ Ms Griffiths showedthe students how to fold the paper to make a book and talked about the order of the pictures.She asked the students to fold the paper, colour in the pictures and write the words.

The students went to their desks to start work on their book. The observer sat with onegroup of six children. Ms Griffiths said, ‘I can’t hear the tap dripping,’ to the whole class inorder to remind the students to work quietly. The students in the observer’s group helpedeach other with folding. Teshan showed another student in the group how to fold. MsGriffiths went around the class saying comments such as, ‘lovely’ and ‘excellent’ whenstudents did a good job. The students started to write the order of the dog’s day in theirbook. Most students in the observer’s group had folded the book except two children,Brendan and Chaz. One student was colouring the pictures. The class was very quiet and thestudents were working. Ms Griffiths commented, ‘what a lovely quiet class.’

Stefan said, ‘I can’t see,’ and went over to the board so he could see the words on the boardso that he could write them down into his booklet. Two children in the group, Cindy andBrian, talked about what they were writing. Teshan said to Cindy, ‘you can copy from me,’then when she noticed that Ms Griffiths had come over to the desk Teshan said to MsGriffiths, ‘Cindy’s copying from Brian.’ Teshan then told Ms Griffiths, ‘I’ve done it,’ andshowed Ms Griffiths her work. Brian and Cindy continued to write the order of the dog’sday into their book from the board. Brendan said, ‘I can’t fold it up right.’ (B) Teshan said,‘I’ll do it for you.’ Teshan folded Brendan’s sheet into a book for him and went through theorder of the pictures. She said, ‘start with that one and now you’re going to number two. (A)Did you do that one?’ (F) Brendan replied, ‘yes.’ Teshan said, ‘now you’re going to do thatone,’ pointing out the next picture in the sequence. Teshan helped Brendan write on hissheet by saying the words and sounding out the letters as she wrote in her book. (AD)Brendan wrote the letters in his book in unison with Teshan. (E) Chaz asked Stefan, ‘can youfold it up for me?’ (F), and Stefan did.

Ms Griffiths said, ‘wonderful what a lovely hard working class.’ Stefan, Teshan, Chaz, andBrendan started colouring their pictures. The students discussed pots of pencils and Cindymade sure the pot was where she could reach it. Teshan asked, ‘have you got a red’ andcommented, ‘they’ve got two reds.’ Ms Griffiths asked the students to pack up and put theirbooks out the front and stand behind their chairs.

Discussion

The elements of good thinking that occurred in the intervention lessons includedexplaining, highlighting discrepancies, adopting new ideas, demonstrating, thinkingand working collaboratively, and asking questions (table 1). It is clear from table 2that these behaviours occurred more frequently in the intervention lessons than inthe control lessons observed as part of this study. This is not a surprising result asthe intervention lessons were designed to be ‘thinking’ lessons from theirconception. The important point is that this study has verified that the intervention

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did, indeed, provide an environment that demonstrated good thinking behavioursmore frequently than regular lessons. The following discussion will explore thenuances and details of the four excerpts presented in the results to answer theResearch Questions. The discussion will initially focus on difficulty as part of alesson and then talk, action and effort by the students taking part in the lesson. Thediscussion will then consider the potential that the thinking behaviours in theintervention lessons have for enhancing students’ cognitive development.

Difficulty

Difficulty featured in each of the four excerpts; however, the responses to thedifficulty were markedly different in the intervention and control lessons. In the firstintervention excerpt, the green T. rex, the difficulty was experienced by all studentsin the group. They simply did not know what to do with the green T. rex. Should theyput it in the group with the other green dinosaurs, or should they put it in the groupwith the other (multicoloured) T. rex? In the second intervention excerpt, livingthings, the difficulty for the children was the classification of things as living or notliving. In particular, the students had difficulty classifying a mushroom and the sun.In the third excerpt, a plant’s life cycle, the difficulty was understanding the scienceconcept of a plant life cycle. Finally, in the fourth excerpt, a dog’s day, the difficultywas about putting things in order.

In both the intervention lessons, difficulty was accepted by the students as anintegral, engaging part of the lesson and the teachers expected the students to workand think to find their own solution to the difficulty. The difficulty in these lessonsresulted in a variety of behaviours from the children that were aimed at solving theproblem. Highlighting discrepancies, brainstorming ideas, explaining, demonstrat-ing and changing ideas all were frequently observed behaviours as the studentsattempted to solve the problems. Highlighting discrepancies occurred with afrequency of 4.7 in the intervention lessons and of 1.4 in the control lessons. Forexample, in the green T. rex activity, the difficulty resulted in a brainstorm whenseveral students explained their ideas to find a potential solution to the problem.The whole group participated in finding a solution. In the living things activity, thedifficulty of deciding whether a mushroom was living or not living resulted in severalstudents giving their opinions and explaining why they thought the mushroom wasalive. Subsequently, one student (Alham) changed his mind, with the result that thegroup correctly classified the mushroom as a living thing.

In contrast, the control lessons showed that the teacher, rather than thestudents, had the solutions to difficulties or that difficulty was something to beavoided. In the first part of the excerpt from the plant’s life cycle lesson, Ms Browninvited students to give their ideas about the meaning of the words ‘life cycle’.Although she accepted these ideas by saying ‘good’, she then dismissed their ideasby adding ‘I’ll give you a clue’ and used her own words to describe the meaning. Thesubtle message throughout this excerpt is that the teacher is the only one with theanswers to the problems encountered. The dog’s day excerpt from a control lessonshowed difficulty being treated as something to be avoided. When a studentexpressed or showed that they were having difficulty, the response from the teacherand, in some cases the students, was to solve the problem for that child, or do thetask for them. The teaching objectives of this lesson were about ordering; however,the approach did not challenge the students to find their own solutions because the

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teacher wrote the answer on the board before they started their individual work.Brendan and Chaz had difficulty folding their booklets and Brendan had difficultywriting the words in his booklet. In these situations, friends simply did the work forthe child having difficulty or helped them in a way that provided them with theanswers and did not require any thoughtful effort.

Talk, action and effort for thinking

Work by Deering and Meloth (for a summary, see Meloth and Deering 1999)indicates that task-related talk about facts, concepts, strategies, and thinking is veryimportant to students’ learning, and that this kind of talk occurs with low frequencyunless there is direct intervention. The first two excerpts and table 2 demonstratethat, during intervention lessons, the children did a lot of explanatory talk, theyexplained the activity, the equipment, the problem, their ideas, what they weredoing, each other’s ideas, and so on. The average number of explanations in anintervention lesson was 28, whereas the average number of explanations in a controllesson was less than seven (table 2). A critical factor was that an explanation wasconsidered in this study to be more than a simple answer to a question that couldonly have one answer or solution. An explanation was considered when a studenttalked about their own self-generated idea that was relevant to the problem. Forexample, in excerpt 2, living things, Pernell was able to explain his idea thatmushrooms live in the garden and you put water on them and they grow. Studentsalso demonstrated more frequently in intervention lessons, with an average of 4.6occurrences per intervention lesson, than in control lessons, when the average wasone (table 2).

In the course of the intervention activities, the way the students explained andspoke about their actions opened their thinking to the group so that they becameshared ideas. This meant ideas could be evaluated by other students, and the teacherand students could discuss the ideas further and act on them accordingly. Ideaswere shared and they were sometimes built upon until satisfactory solutions wereaccomplished. The teachers in the excerpts from the intervention lessons askedquestions and spoke to the students in ways that encouraged them to share theirideas and to speak about what they were doing. The questions were often open-ended and therefore required the children to think and construct their own answers.For example, in the green T. rex, excerpt the teacher often asked questions such as‘so what can we do, how can we solve this problem?’ In the ‘living things’ excerpt,the students’ scientific misconceptions about the sun were shared with the group.This talk resulted in the teacher being able to diagnose the problem and askappropriate questions to guide the students’ thinking in a way that resulted in thegroup correctly classifying the sun as not living.

The fourth excerpt from the control lesson, a dog’s day, is in marked contrastto the first two intervention lessons in that the importance was placed on workingin silence: comments from the teacher such as ‘if you listen you can hear the tap dripand when you do this sheet I want to be able to hear that tap drip’ and ‘what a lovelyquiet class’. This may have been a suitable environment in which the students coulddo the individual work they had been set, but it seems that this kind of environmentis not suitable for encouraging thinking in Year 1. When the students did have theopportunity to speak quietly within their groups the talk was often non-productiveor not related to the task. For example, some students spoke about cheating and

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others talked about pencil pots. Even when the students were encouraged to talk inthe control classes, rarely were they required to think and explain their ideas orconstruct their own solutions to a problem. For example, during the lesson on aplant’s life cycle the teacher often asked closed question such as ‘what’s it called?’and ‘has anyone seen a shoot?’, which could only be answered with simple one-wordanswers. There were few opportunities for students to explain their ideas.

A disposition of good thinkers described by Tishman et al. (1995) is thetendency to devote time and effort to thinking. An implicit expectation evident inthe first and second excerpts from the intervention lessons was that the childrenshould think to solve problems, to contribute new ideas, to explain what they weredoing and to justify their suggestions. The green T. rex activity showed that thinkingwas not only expected, but explicitly encouraged; when Seren said ‘let me think!’and put his hands up to his head, the teacher added ‘you might all need to put onyour thinking caps’. This attention to thinking immediately preceded the sequenceof events that led to the solution of the green T. rex problem. The implicit andexplicit expectation that students think was evident in the intervention lessons andis probably an important aspect of a thinking environment for Year 1.

Potential for enhanced cognitive development

The kind of talk and action the students in the intervention lessons were involvedin were of the kind that, according to research (Hogan and Tudge 1999, Melothand Deering 1999, Wegeriff et al. 1999), is likely to result in cognitive advance.It is important to ask the question that, if we view the findings of this studyfrom a developmental perspective, is there potential for enhanced cognitivedevelopment?

Some of the behaviours described in the findings that helped children solve theintervention activities can be explained by Piaget’s notion of autonomy. Theconcrete operational child is not egocentric in the way pre-operational children areand can assume the viewpoint of others (Wadsworth 1996). Table 2 shows that therewas an average of about three occasions in each intervention lesson when a studentor students were able to adopt a new idea, and it was very infrequent (0.1) in thecontrol lessons. For example, in the intervention excerpt from a science lessonabout living things, Alham initially said that a mushroom was not alive and wantedto classify it with the other non-living things. The teacher pointed to the mushroomand encouraged other students to give their opinions. After listening to his peers’ideas about a mushroom, Alham changed his mind and agreed that a mushroom isa living thing. This exemplifies good thinking because he was able to use a pattern ofthinking typical of a concrete operational child; that is, he was able to assume theother children’s viewpoint and classify the mushroom as a living thing.

The concrete operational child also is increasingly capable of evaluatingarguments rather than simply accepting pre-formed unilateral ideas (Wadsworth1996). It is interesting that early in the green T. rex excerpt all the students, exceptJoshua, agreed with Tiffany to simply put the green T. rex in the T. rex group. Thereis no evidence that Tiffany had given a good explanation as to why it should go thereand not in the green group, and the other students simply accepted this unjustifiedidea. From this point on in the lesson the teacher modelled and encouragedevaluative behaviour. She asked the students for other ideas for a solution to theproblem and encouraged them to explain why and how. The ideas were welcomed

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but the teacher modelled the process of evaluation, by giving reasons why they werenot suitable solutions. This moved the children beyond the point where theyunquestioningly accepted one idea. They continued to contribute new ideas untilthey reached a suitable solution. This kind of behaviour, encouraged by the teacher,resulted in the group as a whole being able to evaluate arguments as a concreteoperational child would do rather than thinking in a pre-operational manner, simplyaccepting the pre-formed unilateral ideas.

The green T. rex and the living things excerpts can also be viewed through aVygotskyian theoretical lens as the role of social activity is clearly evident. Vygotskyclaimed that the child’s learning can be assessed by those additional problems thata child can solve with social assistance, the notion of zone of proximal development(Light et al. 1991). In the green T. rex excerpt, the teacher took a lead role inpromoting the brainstorming activity to switch the students on to thinking aboutalternatives to putting the green T. rex in one or the other group. The teacherprovided the expertise necessary to guide the students through the zone of proximaldevelopment where their ability to consider alternatives was not evident and hadprobably not yet matured. Vygotsky claimed that teaching is only good when itaddresses those functions that are in a stage of maturing, which lie in the zone ofproximal development (Vygotsky 1978).

Conclusions

This study used the context of a cognitive acceleration intervention project,CASE@KS1, to investigate the notion of good thinking in Year 1, especially as itrelates to scientific thinking. The intervention lessons observed as part of thisresearch were different from the control lessons in several ways. Children inintervention lessons more frequently explained and demonstrated their ideas,actions and difficulties. They more frequently made suggestions for solvingproblems, highlighted discrepancies, adopted new ideas, and worked collabor-atively. The intervention lessons also were different from the regular lessonsobserved in that difficulty was an accepted part of the lesson and the students wereexpected to put effort into solving the problems they encountered.

From both Piagetian and Vygotskyian perspectives, the kind of thinking thatoccurred in the intervention lessons did provide potential for enhanced cognitivedevelopment. Consequently, the behaviours identified were considered to beexamples of how good thinking manifests in Year 1. There is evidence that supportsthe claim that children were guided from pre-operational thought patterns toconcrete operational thought patterns during the course of the intervention lessonsexamined. For example, some children showed less tendency to egocentricity andincreased tendency to evaluate arguments. The role of social activity was prominentin the intervention lessons and evidence of Year 1 children building on each other’sideas to find a solution to a problem was demonstrated. Children were able to solveproblems that they were initially unable to solve through interaction with moreknowledgeable peers and with their teachers.

The results of this study indicate that the Year 1 children were engaged in goodthinking while participating in the intervention activities. Although the focus was onthe children, many of their behaviours were induced by the actions of their teacher.It is possible, therefore, to extract salient information from the findings presented inthis study to make an assertion about how teachers can foster good thinking through

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science. The evidence suggests there are two critical factors that teachers canemploy to foster good thinking in young children when they are learning science. Wesuggest that habits of good thinking can be fostered in regular science lessons ifattention is given to these critical factors. The first critical factor is difficulty.Difficulty should be an accepted part of the learning process. Children should beencouraged to undertake challenging science problems and helped with strategiesfor solving the problems. The challenge should be at a level just beyond that whichthe children have already achieved so that it is possible for them to use new ideas tofind solutions (Vygotsky 1978). The second critical factor is that children shouldtalk about, act on and put effort into thinking about problems. Teachers shouldencourage children to explain the problems, ideas, actions, misunderstandings,agreements, questions and possible solutions that they have about science. Throughthese actions, thinking becomes a discernible part of the classroom environment.Children should be given time to think and opportunities to talk and demonstratetheir ideas. Teachers should model thinking out loud, talk about their thinking andtheir actions and encourage children to do the same. Teachers should use open-ended questions that require the students to engage in original thought before theyare able to answer.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms have been used for all teachers and students in this paper.2. Categories are described in table 1.

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Fostering thinking through science in the early years of schooling