Explore the concept of “light” and its interaction with matter: an inquiry-based science education project in primary school

摘要

The exploration process leading to the understanding of physical phenomena, suchas light and its interaction with matter, raises great interest and curiosity in children. However,in most primary schools, children rarely have the opportunity to conduct science activities inwhich they can engage in an enquiry process even if by the action of the teacher. In thiscontext, we have organised several in-service teacher training courses and carried out severalpedagogic interventions in Portuguese primary schools, with the aim of promoting inquirybasedscience education. This article describes one of those projects, developed with a class ofthe third grade, which explored the curricular topic “Light Experiments”. Various activitieswere planned and implemented, during a total of ten hours spread over five lessons. Thespecific objectives of this paper are: to illustrate and analyse the teaching and learning processpromoted in the classroom during the exploration of one of these lessons, and to assesschildren’s learning three weeks after the lessons. The results suggest that children madesignificant learning which persisted. We conclude discussing some processes that stimulatedchildren’ learning, including the importance of teacher questioning in scaffolding children'slearning and some didactic implications for teacher training.