Children’s understanding of scientific concepts:Combining a micro-developmental approach with a longitudinal study

This paper shows that the social (teacher) and material environment (task) play an active part in children's learning process and cannot be viewed as a separate, outside-based influence on cognitive development. We illustrate this using a longitudinal study on children's understanding of scientific concepts. A researcher worked five times during 1.5 years with 31 children (3-5 years old, from regular and special education) on hands-on scientific tasks about air pressure and gravity. We developed a coding scheme in which we first classified the utterances of the child and researcher into categories, and used skill theory (Fischer, 1980) to assess the complexity level of children's task-related utterances. This resulted in time-serial data of five sessions per child. These time series were coupled and a cluster analysis was used to examine the developmental trajectories on the long term (i.e., the 5 visits). Three clusters were found: The first one scored better than the other two clusters, showing higher complexity levels with each visit; the second one showed high variability from visit to visit, and the third showed a more stable pattern over time. We found that these developmental trajectories could best be predicted by interactions between the child and his/her proximal environment