Centered on Student Ideas

As a student-centered curriculum, Smithsonian Science for the Classroom recognizes that students’ everyday experiences provide a rich foundation of science knowledge and skills. Research has shown that students’ prior knowledge and experiences, even in the early grades, offer robust resources for making sense of natural phenomena and solving problems (National Research Council, 2007; Keifert & Stevens, 2019). Students’ ideas are placed front and center through STEM notebooks, group work, class charts, and presenting ideas publicly in whole-class discussions. 

Students’ observations and predictions about milkweed bug specimens are made available for their peers through class charts.

Smithsonian Science for the Classroom’s materials make space for and recognize the value of students’ prior experiences. The curriculum provides support so that teachers may leverage students’ naive ideas and build on them. Hands-on investigations help students test their existing ideas, integrate new information, and make new connections. 

Students test the idea that sound causes vibrations when they see that sound from their kazoos makes salt jump.

Many naive ideas align strongly with natural intuition or past experience. This often includes the way students think about Science and Engineering Practices. For example, students may think that models are always smaller versions of the thing they represent, such as a model train. By building models to explain phenomena or solve problems, students see how models in science are designed to make specific features of a system more salient. 

Students model the forces in a game of tug-of-war using rubber bands attached to a wooden block.

To help teachers leverage students’ naive ideas about science concepts and practices, we have compiled many of the common naive ideas found in science education research that are most relevant to each module. These are listed in the Module Overview, and specific suggestions for ways to push student thinking forward are included in Good Thinking! call-out boxes throughout each lesson. Naive ideas are not to be treated as incorrect answers to be corrected, rather as conceptual resources to engage and build on. 

Callout boxes highlight places where teachers can build on students' ideas. 

References

National Research Council. Taking science to school: Learning and teaching science in grades K-8. National Academies Press, 2007.

Keifert, Danielle, and Reed Stevens. "Inquiry as a members’ phenomenon: Young children as competent inquirers." Journal of the Learning Sciences 28, no. 2 (2019): 240-278.