Children's Spontaneous Gestures Reflect Verbal Understanding of the Day/Night Cycle.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the day/night cycle requires integrating observations of the sky (an Earth-based perspective) with scientific models of the solar system (a space-based perspective). Yet children often fail to make the right connections and resort to non-scientific intuitions - for example, the Sun moving up and down - to explain what they observe. The present research explored whether children's gestures indicate their conceptual integration of Earth- and space-based perspectives. We coded the spontaneous gestures of 85 third-grade children in U.S. public schools (M _age = 8.87 years) as they verbally explained the overall cause of the day/night cycle, the cause of sunrise, and the cause of sunset after receiving science instruction as part of a prior st

SUBMITTER: Gaudreau CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7326024 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature