만 3, 4, 5세 유아의 과학적 질문에 관한 연구

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to utilize scientific questions as a basic materials when we select the contents of children’s science education by means of searching interesting areas of children about science and understanding the situation in which scientific questions emerged. In order to get data, we collected and analyzed the questions of three-, four-, five-year-old children in normal classrooms. The subjects were 75 children who attended at A kindergarten which were located in Dongjak-gu, Seoul. The researcher had collected children’s questions through natural observation method once a week according to each age for 11 weeks from May 3rd to September 18th in 2005. The results of this study were as follows：first, the contents of scientific questions were containing food, time-place-situation, word-letter as well as natural phenomenon, living things, human beings, objects and materials, tools and machines which were included in the area of inquiry-living of the 6th kindergarten curriculum. Second, the contexts in which scientific questions emerged offered meaningful findings according to the types of children’s experiences and activities in each time-zone. In other word, we could find that many scientific questions were brought along with direct experiences rather than with the experiences by observation or verbal experiences. In addition, we could see much more scientific questions emerging when children were let come up with talking materials during a discourse activity.