ABSTRACT
Problems with learning concepts Science is not just about exploration, but also about sharing the knowledge and understanding that people have accumulated over time. For children, the problem with science is having to ‘learn facts’. There is a lot to learn and it is easy to get things wrong. This includes new words, or new uses of words, because science, like many other activities, has its own technical vocabulary. A further difficulty is that some scientific explanations are counter-intuitive. Children’s everyday observations may lead them to hold firmly established ideas which turn out to be ‘wrong’ in terms of science. For example, a ball rolling along on grass will slowly come to a stop. If we think that the ball needs force to make it move, then it is reasonable to think that it stops because it has run out of force. A more scientific explanation would be that the ball eventually stops because the forces acting on it cause it to slow down. Children sometimes find science too abstract and separate from their everyday understanding. Force is an abstract idea; the concept of force is a strange notion for children, as is the idea that humans are animals made up of little cells, or that mass when affected by gravity becomes weight. Confusion arises because these scientific accounts do not map easily on to what children can see, feel and hear.
