Primary School Children's Tacit and Explicit Understanding of Object Motion
Aims and Objectives:
- To analyse primary schools children's tacit and explicit knowledge of object motion using computer-simulated scenarios.
- To incorporate the scenarios into teaching software, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching software.
Project Summary:
The aim of the project is to analyse primary school children's knowledge of horizontal and vertical object motion. Horizontal object motion will be investigated using a scenario of a ball moving across a billiards table and will be presented using a laptop. Children will be asked to make judgements on speed and direction of motion using two different types of task.
In one task children will be shown a ball moving across the screen and asked whether it moved as they expected it to. Half the time the ball will have moved correctly and half the time it will not have (for example the ball might have rolled into a left hand pocket on the table although the cue struck the ball centrally). This type of task is designed to establish what children tacitly understand about object motion.
During the second type of task children will be asked to make predictions about the billiard ball's motion across the table in order to establish what they explicitly understand about object motion (for example they will be shown a cue striking a ball and then asked to predict which pocket the ball will roll into). Similar types of task will be used to investigate understanding of how gravity and fluid resistance affect the direction and speed of falling objects using scenarios with objects being dropped from carriers in the sky or on water.
Each type of task will be presented in separate testing sessions of approximately 15 minutes. We expect children to be more successful in the tacit task than the explicit task and a future aim, after documenting the different levels of understanding, will be to develop ways of utilising these two different forms of knowledge in science teaching.
This research will be carried out on children in years 2, 4 and 6 at a number of primary schools in East Anglia. This project commenced in January 2007 and will finish December 2009.
Results:
Results will be posted as they become available.
Contacts:
Principle Investigator:
Professor Christine Howe
E-mail: [cjh82cam.ac.uk]
Research Associate:
Joana Taylor Tavares
E-mail: [jvt21@cam.ac.uk]
Research Assistant:
Amy Devine
E-mail: [ajd85@cam.ac.uk]
Project address:
Object Motion Project
Faculty of Education
184 Hills Road
Cambridge CB2 8PQ
England
Phone: +44 (0)1223 767600
