ABSTRACT
The next four chapters are about children’s learning, mostly concerned with how we can best provide for it in school. However, it is important to recognise that children are learning without formal intervention, beginning at birth and continuing throughout life. This chapter therefore looks at some of the ideas that children have worked out for themselves and at reasons for taking them into account in developing children’s scientific understanding. A great deal has been uncovered about the ideas that children form and bring to school and the fact that these ideas exist is no longer a surprise. Indeed, some of the ideas described in this chapter are well known. This does not, however, diminish their importance as starting points. The arguments for this remain as firm as ever. We therefore begin this chapter with a brief review of these reasons and then look at some examples of children’s ideas. The chapter concludes with a list of characteristics of children’s ideas which give clues to helping children to develop more scientific ideas. We return to these later, in Chapter 11.
