How do pupils learn science concepts?

It has been a nature of the child to be curious with his/her surroundings. Inquisitive as they are, they are fan of asking “How did it happen, what makes it possible to do that, or why did it happen that way?” In these cases, there is a need to satisfy the craving for knowledge for learning to occur.

            In many different ways, we tend to ask the same questions as the children do. Upon asking, we are likely to seek for the right answer as much as possible. But young as the mind of a child is, if we are asked with childish but intelligent questions such as, where did the rain come from, we find difficulty in explaining the correct science concept to them. Our reaction sets off the tone of children’s learning. While we don’t to know all the answers, we try to support their curiosity by telling them stories which in some times create misconception in the world around us. During these times, there is an interaction between their experiences and their reflexes or behavior-patterns. Piaget then called it as schemata. He suggested that through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences. When individuals assimilate, they incorporate the new experience into an already existing framework without changing that framework. This may occur when individuals' experiences are aligned with their internal representations of the world, but may also occur as a failure to change a defective understanding; for example, they may not notice events, may misunderstand input from others, or may decide that an event is an accident and is therefore unimportant as information about the world.

In contrast, when individuals' experiences contradict their internal representations, they may change their perceptions of the experiences to fit their internal representations. According to the theory, accommodation is the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences. Accommodation can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning: when we act on the expectation that the world operates in one way and it violates our expectations, we often fail, but by accommodating this new experience and reframing our model of the way the world works, we learn from the experience of failure, or others' failure.

            In a less broad sense, teaching of the science can be done at an ease if we allow them to observe, organize and change/retain their prior knowledge. By experiencing the successful completion of challenging tasks, learners gain confidence and motivation to embark on more complex challenges which then lead to learning. The teacher acts as little as possible helping the learner to get to his or her own understanding of the content. The emphasis thus turns away from the instructor and the content, but towards the learner creating a learner-centered learning process.