Children's Chemistry Reasoning

What is the project?

This inter-disciplinary project, combining cognitive psychology paradigms with education and chemistry approaches, aims to explore children's knowledge of how substances mix prior to systematic chemistry instruction. More specifically, the project aims to study children’s earliest understandings of chemistry, with experiments on how 4- to 11-year-olds understand what happens when substances / materials mix. When a solid is mixed with a liquid, it might dissolve forming a solution, with the solid disappearing in the liquid, or it might suspend in the liquid, with particles diffused throughout, or it may do nothing, just floating/sinking, or the two might be involved in a chemical reaction, forming new substance(s). The outcome depends on various chemical properties of the different substances, including substance-kind (roughly, different molecular structure and bonding within molecules) and form (roughly, depending on bonding between molecules.

We focus on mixing, because it is one of the earliest chemistry concept children are deemed capable of grasping. Very little work – either in cognition or education – concerns such young children. Most existing studies of chemical understanding used interviews, suggesting little or no conception of the particulate nature of matter, with primary school students attending to macroscopic properties of substances instead (i.e., what they can see). Briefly, by particulate nature of matter we mean the idea that substances are made up of invisible, sub-microscopic particles, with molecules being the smallest particles of most substances. Some knowledge of the particulate nature of matter is necessary to understand substances and how they interact with each other. Therefore, investigating the emergence of this level of understanding is important for effective science teaching.

Why this research?

Young children show sophisticated reasoning about the physical world. This reasoning ability is used to support later learning of more complex scientific concepts. However, the abilities of young children to reason about the chemical world have not been well explored. Teaching methods are influenced by the knowledge children bring to the classroom before instruction begins. In learning to read, for example, kids make use of their existing language knowledge. By investigating what young children know about the chemical processes in their everyday lives this project hopes to inform science education. These chemical events may be sugar dissolving in water, soap making bubbles, oil floating in water or even food changing by the process of cooking. By allowing teachers to make use of children’s existing knowledge about the physical world more appropriate age-specific lesson content can be devised. The research also has potential to inform psychology by shedding light on how young children learn about the physical world around them.

What does it involve?

Get Involved

If you or your children would like to get involved in this research please contact Michelle Ellefson (mre33@cam.ac.uk) to find out more and to arrange a session. The project involves children from reception class up to year 6 (ages 4 – 11) as well as adults. If you are a teacher, a science coordinator or head teacher and would like to get involved as part of a school science programme then please contact Connor Quinn. We have worked with several schools to great success. The individual sessions are designed in such a way so that we might conduct the research with a minimum of disruption to students and classes. Our study requires only quiet space to work and can provide an enjoyable complement to the science learned in the classroom. We appreciate the various constraints on classes across the school year and are happy to discuss individual arrangements with schools.

Want to know more?

You can download results and grant reports from: More Chemistry!

Acknowledgments