Teaching and Learning Strategies for Primary Science:

INVESTIGATION

Kinds of hands-on experience are most accurate than experiment

Have children using the basic and causal processes.

Are usually designed to find out how something works or to test a simple prediction.

For example, an investigation with magnets would have children touch the magnet to a
variety of objects around the classroom and make a list of those objects the magnets
attracted and those the magnet did not attract.

The children find that magnets attract some metal objects and do not attract any
nonmetallic objects.

The children then predict which objects in the hallway will be attracted and test those
predictions.

In this activity, the children are collecting data, drawing conclusion from that data and
gaining a concept of magnetism. What they are not doing is conducting an experiment.

EXPERIMENT

Used by scientists to gain the evidence to support or refute a given hypothesis and
through hypothesis testing to support or refute a given theory.

To a child, doing an experiment means ‘doing something to see what will happen’.

Experimenting is an integrated science process skill because it requires basic skills

such as observing, classifying, making inferences, predicting, measuring,
communicating.

CRITERIA OF EXPERIMENT:
 1) The children need to have an idea of what to test. Because of this, they change
an object, an event or situation for certain reasons. The act of forming an idea
and testing it later is called making of hypothesis.

2) The children should change only one variable at a time. If necessary, they should
compare results when a variable is changed and when it is not. This skill is called
controlling variables.

DEMONSTRATION

Is an activity which is similar to or which imitates a real situation.

2 main examples of simulation:

Role-playing

An activity which places children in a situation in which they have to assume themselves
as characters (human or non-human) and play these characters. Children try to act,
feel and react as the characters they represent might do.

Games

Require the application of science knowledge and strategies to win

Discrepant event

Is a phenomenon which is inconsistent with what a pupil expects because it has a

surprising and pparadoxical outcome.

According to Piaget’s theory, a discrepant event is one that does not fit in with the
pupil’s existing schema or mental structure.

As a result, he is in the position of disequilibrium. He wants to resolve the inconsistency.

As the discrepant event is not consistent with his expectation, he is not able to
assimilate the new information and must modify his existing schema to accommodate it.
A discrepant event can be used in the first phase, namely orientation of the Needham’s
Five-Phase Constructivist Model.