Young children's (7‐11) ideas about light and their development

Abstract

This paper describes research work which examined and developed young children's (7‐11) understanding of light and associated phenomena. Previous work in the area is reviewed briefly. The work consisted of four phases: a pilot phase, a pre‐intervention elicitation, an intervention phase and a post‐intervention elicitation. Data were collected by a mixture of writing and drawing from 64 children and analysed using systemic networks to provide a semi‐quantitative picture of children's thinking. This enabled a comparison of the features of children's ideas before and after the intervention phase. The work focused on four aspects of children's ideas about light: ideas about sources of light, representations of light, the nature of vision and the context dependence of answers. Data presented concentrate on one of these aspects, children's views of the nature of vision.