Examining young children’s 1

The case study in this article presented the process of conceptual change in six-year olds.

The process was described from two different view points: how the children’s

conceptions change during the instructional process and how the social discussion during

the experimental exploration can be seen in terms of the cognitive changes in children.

Young children’s conceptual change has not been as widely studied as that in older

students. The researcher in this case study suggested that conceptual changes as a party of

the learning process should be viewed as a life long process, which begins before

children enter school. Six-year-old children undergo floating and sinking during their

conceptual change process. This article attempted to describe this process and how social

discourse during the process of knowledge construction is linked to the change in

children’s concepts.

Conceptual change had generally been examined only through cognitive functions as a

general process without consideration of the context before this case study. The children

that were selected for this study were pre-schoolers age six. They all hailed from the city

of Joensuu, Finland and were from the kindergarten involved with the ESKO research

project. The groups wanted to participate in the study, but the researchers taught the topic

after the teachers disagreed. The children came from two different groups in the

kindergarten with mixed genders.

The research was conducted into three parts: pre-interview, instructional process, and

post-interview. The pre-interview consisted of two parts that aimed to determine the

children’s present knowledge and experiences of floating and sinking. First, the children

were ask to explain what they thought the terms ‘sink’ and ‘float’ meant. They also