Science Post #4

Trying to figure out what my students’ understanding of scientific concepts still seems a little foreign to me. It also seems like a difficult thing to try to do. We haven’t had a lot of exposure to science when working with kids in our various placements over the past two years. All over the interactions I’ve had in science have shown me that teachers are not particularly interested in relating what they are teaching to what the children already know. They tend to begin a unit assuming that they don’t know anything about the topic, so they begin a lecture on all the things they want the students to learn. It all seems disjointed to me.
Going into the bubble experiment, I had a very similar expectation. I assumed that they would know nothing about surface tension, and to an extent I was right. I did not think about what they could connect this to, though. Really, they do have an understanding of surface tension that may not actually be linked to a specific concept. They have seen water pool together when it rains. They know that things can float on top of the water. They have most likely played with bubbles before. All of these are valuable pieces of knowledge that should be examined when thinking about what their conceptual understanding is. I think that by talking about conceptual understanding in an overly sophisticated way, we think that there has to be some sort of definitive knowledge base for the students to know anything about the concept we are trying to teach. That isn’t true. We have to understand what they know about anything and use that to our advantage when teaching them the more specific ideas and concepts. I think this is true in a lot of our education classes too, though. We are asked how we are going to assess what they know beforehand. We don’t have to come up with a formal assessment for this every time. Asking them what they know can be enough. Observing them goes a long way. I think we have to be careful to not get in the mindset that we have to have such involved forms of assessing them or that they must have a prescribed set of facts in their knowledge base to make their knowledge valuable.
With this being said, I think a lot of my understanding of what the students know will come from observing them in my classroom. I am teaching a unit on nutrition in the spring, so I can observe what decisions they make in the lunch room. By knowing my students, we will have talked about what their favorite foods are. I will also start the unit by asking them what they know. We will have an overarching question to help guide us throughout the unit (or maybe several) that help us to begin the discussion about what we know and lead us to learn more about the topic.