Young Children Think Like Scientists

Scientists analyze statistical patterns in data, they do experiments, and they learn from other scientists. Growing research indicates that young children learn about the world around them in similar ways…”

Have you ever watched a young child absorbed in play for an extended period of time? I love to secretly watch my toddler as he plays by himself. It’s not easy to catch him in that mode when he forgets you’re there, and focuses intensely on what’s he’s doing. In my opinion, he’s always played in a rather quirky way—very engineer-like. He has a long attention span for a kid, and will focus on what he’s doing intensely for fairly long periods of time. It always seemed like he was trying to figure things out, more than entertain himself. In other words, watching him play always reminded me more of watching a scientist at work, than anything.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s ever wondered about this aspect of play. Alison Gopnick, who studies childhood learning and development at the University of California at Berkeley, recently published a study on this very topic.

According to Gopnick’s research, a lot of what looks like play (to adults) is actually a child’s experimentation. She claims that what children are doing during play is a bunch of “experiments” that give them the information they need to figure out how things work. (In other words, children are engaged in hands-on learning when they’re “playing”). I call this, “testing the laws of physics”. Perhaps when kids go through that annoying stage where they like to throw everything on the floor, they’re just testing a hypothesis about gravity.

The difficult thing sometimes for parents is knowing when to jump in and “help” and when to back off and let children do their own problem solving. As an adult, it can be very hard to resist the urge to show a child how to do something. “Being shown how to do something has advantages, for both young children and for scientists, as well as disadvantages.” On one hand, there’s occasions when children genuinely want you to show them how to do something. However, parents (and teachers) often err on the side of jumping in too soon, and providing too much instruction. Often it’s better to let a child try to work something out for herself, than to automatically assume she needs help. “Being taught something instead of exploring it for oneself discourages exploration…” (Gopnick).

Gopnick's findings come at a time when the focus in early childhood education seems to an increasing emphasis on increasing the time spent on direct instruction of academic skills in reading and math. If you’ve been in a kindergarten classroom since NCLB, you’ve probably noticed that it’s almost indistinguishable from a first grade classroom. Kids now receive way more formal reading and math instruction in kindergarten than they used to.

As well intentioned as this may be, it directly flies in the face of what is known about how very young children learn. The urge to capitalize on the period when children undergo amazing cognitive growth is understandable, but the effectiveness of increasing formal academic instruction at the expense of allowing children to develop in a more typical and age-appropriate way: through direct experiences, imaginative play, experimentation, and exploring the world around them.

Unstructured play and daily life provide an experiential base that children need to have in place before they can fully benefit from more abstract academic instruction (Basically it builds a “context” for everything that will follow). The push to make preschool more structured and academic (more school-like) forgets that experiential hands-on learning is the major avenue of learning for children and is how children learn how to engage in critical thinking. Kids learn a great deal from watching and interacting in the world, and this is very difficult to replicate in basal reading series.

The Preschool Laboratory: Young Children Think Like Scientists, Wynne Parry, LiveScience.com, 27 September 2012

http://www.livescience.com/23522-young-children-think-like-scientists.html