When Linguistic Elements Contribute to Conceptual Dynamics: The Case of Chinese Students’ Pre-instructional Ideas About the Earth

Abstract

In this study, we explore how cross-linguistic differences can contribute to children’s scientific thinking. We compared first and third grade Chinese students’ pre-instructional ideas of the earth expressed in clinical interviews with that of their English-speaking and Greek-speaking counterparts (as recorded in the literature). Inspired by a “Complex Dynamic Systems” (CDS) theoretical perspective on cognition and by the literature on “linguistic relativity” we hypothesized that in cases when two language systems offer greatly different linguistic elements, differences can be expected in how these elements interact with other types of conceptual elements. Consequently, such changes in dynamics may lead to variations in system-level conceptual structures emerging from native speakers of different languages. Our findings showed that (1) Chinese students held no flat or dual earth type of pre-instructional ideas about the earth; (2) Chinese students provided significantly more sphere-based responses than their American and Greek counterparts when responding to questions directly addressing the shape of the earth; (3) such cross-linguistic differences largely vanished for questions not directly getting at the shape of the earth, resulting in high frequency of inconsistency when responses to all the interview questions were interpreted as a whole. We discuss the significance and possible implications of these results for research on cross-cultural conceptual development and for teaching and learning science.

Keywords:

• Conceptual change
• developmental psychology
• elementary science
• qualitative methodology
• quantitative methodology
• science education

Notes

1 A recent policy change adjusts the start of science teaching to the 1^st grade in China. When we collected data for this study, this policy had not yet been implemented.

2 In our protocol, a question includes all its follow-ups, so the number of questions in our protocol are unequal to that of the original protocol.

3 According to their categorization, none of the Chinese (and Australian) students held flat or dual earth type of pre-instructional ideas, which aligns with our data. Comparison cannot be drawn regarding consistency levels because of the use of a significantly different interview protocol.