Educating Young Children in Math, Science, and Technology
A CONTEXT FOR LEARNING
Educating Young Children in Math, Science, and Technology
By David Elkind
Any intellectually responsible program to instruct young children in math, science, and technology must overcome at least three seemingly insurmountable obstacles. One of these is our adult inability to discover, either by reflection or analysis, the means by which children acquire science and technology concepts. Another obstacle is that young children think differently than we do and do not organize their world along the same lines as do older children and adults. Finally, young children have their own curriculum priorities and construct their own math, science, and technology concepts. These concepts, while age-appropriate, may appear wrong from an adult perspective. We need to consider each of these obstacles before turning to a few suggestions as to how they can be best overcome.
Obstacle 1. Using Reflective or Logical Analysis
Math, science, and technology are abstract mental constructions far removed from the immediate, here-and-now world of the young child. As adults, we cannot retrace the steps we took in attaining these concepts inasmuch as they are part of our intellectual unconscious and unavailable to retrospective analysis. A simple thought experiment illustrates the point.
Imagine you are teaching a young child of four or five to ride a small, two-wheeled bicycle. What is the most important thing the child has to learn to succeed at this skill? If the reader is like most adults, he or she will answer “Balance. The child has to learn to keep his or her weight centered on the seat.”
In fact, if you actually attempt to teach a child to ride a two-wheeled bicycle, the problem turns out to be quite different. What you observe is that the young child focuses either upon pumping the bicycle’s pedals and forgets to steer, or focuses upon steering and forgets to pump. In fact, balance is attained when children coordinate pumping with steering. Once we have attained that balance, however, we are no longer aware of how we accomplished it. Although this example is a simple illustration, it makes a very powerful point. If we want to teach young children math, science, and technology, we cannot start from some reflective analysis of the task, but rather we must actually observe children attempting to learn the task. This statement reflects one of Jean Piaget’s (1950) most important insights, and one that must not be forgotten.
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