It’s important to get every child off to a strong start in science, yet there is surprisingly little guidance on how to do this. This makes it difficult for science leads and early years foundation stage leads to work together and ensure that children get the strong foundations they need to develop as scientists.
At the sharp end of this challenge are children from low-income families who, according to a report prepared by the University of Oxford for the Royal Society, “make poor progress in science at every stage of their school careers”.
International research suggests that addressing science achievement gaps requires more intensive efforts in early years.
So, how can we ensure that all children get a rich early education in science and avoid the situation where family background is so strongly associated with later achievement?
Developing children’s early communication
Firstly, effective science learning depends on strong skills in communication and language. The Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance report, Improving Primary Science, emphasises the importance of improving children’s scientific vocabulary and encouraging children to explain their thinking.
Both require children to have a broad general vocabulary and strong communication skills. An early years focus on developing children’s early communication also provides the foundations for later success in science.
Secondly, it is important to challenge a child development myth. When I was training to be a teacher, I was taught that as children got older, they moved from a “naive scientist” stage to being rational science learners. More recent research (Goswami, 2015) suggests this is false.
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Young children certainly develop naive theories about the world through exploring objects, using all their senses. Most of those naive theories are helpful: when we let go of an object, we know it will fall to the ground.
Newtonian physics, of course, gives us a richer account. For example, if we drop a ball from a moving train, it will not fall straight down but instead fall forward because the moving train imparts a force.
However, even when we “know” this through science teaching, it’s still very difficult for us to imagine that the ball will not fall straight down. In fact, we never replace our naive theories with a more rational scientific knowledge: instead, we learn to inhibit them in favour of what we’ve been taught.
That sort of cognitive inhibition requires strong executive function skills. Those skills develop most strongly in early years.
Research evidence suggests that early years practices like challenging outdoor play, learning nursery rhymes and playing games like Simon Says are powerful contexts for developing these skills.
Thirdly, other scientific skills of measuring accurately or controlling for variables also depend on the executive function skill of being able to screen out distractions.
When you need to measure temperature with precision, you must not let your focus drift to some other part of the experiment or get distracted by something going on around you.
Misguided attempts
None of this is to say that we should not focus on early scientific learning in nursery and Reception classes. It is important that the early years curriculum develops children’s general knowledge of the world around them, of animals and plants.
We can also usefully encourage children to notice and discuss natural phenomena, like changes in the seasons, duck eggs hatching or the change of state from ice to water and back again.
However, during many school visits, I have seen well-meaning attempts to put lots of content into EYFS plans so there is a clear science curriculum running from nursery through to Year 6. This is misguided. It is more important to be parsimonious, focussing on a small number of areas.
We should put our main effort into ensuring that children have a rich, high-quality early education that focuses on developing their communication, executive function skills and general knowledge about the world.
Julian Grenier CBE is the co-author of Putting the EYFS Curriculum into Practice
