La educación científica en infantilcontribución a su aprendizaje desde la formación del grado de maestro/a en educación infantil

Abstract

This thesis is presented as a compendium of publications with the following three articles: "Cantó Doménech, J., de Pro Bueno A., Solbes J. (2016) ¿Qué ciencias se enseñan y cómo se hace en las aulas de educación infantil? La visión de los maestros en formación inicial. Enseñanza de las Ciencias, 34 (3), 25-50. "Cantó Doménech, J., de Pro Bueno, A., Solbes, J. (2017) ¿Qué resultados de aprendizaje alcanzan los futuros maestros de infantil cuando planifican unidades didácticas de ciencias? Revista Eureka sobre Enseñanza y Divulgación de las Ciencias, 14 (3), 666-688. "Cantó Doménech, J., de Pro Bueno A., Solbes J. (2017) ¿Cómo utilizan los conocimientos en ciencias los futuros maestros de educación infantil ante una información escrita? Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales y Sociales, 33 (2), 99-122. The research objectives were formulated in the following terms: "RO1: To know what is the vision of future teachers in early childhood education on the real teaching practice of science teaching in the classroom. "RO2: Evaluate how future teachers in early childhood education apply their scientific knowledge in their professional field when they prepare teaching units. "RO3: Explore how the future teachers in early childhood education apply their scientific knowledge in situations outside the formal scope of education. The participants were students of the 4th year of the Master's Degree in Early Childhood Education at the Campus d'Ontinyent of the University of Valencia. We have proposed three investigations through open and closed questionnaires and the analysis of their own production materials. The main results found were: "With respect to RO1: The presence of sciences in the classrooms of children presents notable deficiencies and part of curricular scientific contents are missing from the classrooms. It also lacks activities of the scientific methodology. Regarding the methodology, there is a lack of specific activities of scientific learning, in which sensory experience, experimentation, free play as a discovery should prevail... as opposed to more traditional ones. In conclusion, in view of the results, there is a teaching that has more to do with the non-reflective repetition of certain topics than with the fact that sciences are part of children's education. "With respect to RO2: We do not find any consolidated learning result and those that have been reached are the most generalist, leaving the most specific ones of our knowledge area as "in process" or directly not consolidated. This rather disheartening result reaffirms considerations made in the RO1 that the credits assigned to our area are clearly insufficient to achieve the established learning outcomes, or that these are too ambitious for the number of credits assigned. "Regarding OI3: It has been seen that the students who have participated in the study do have scientific knowledge (which reaffirms what was said in OI2). Possibly at a level that we wish would be higher, but we must always bear in mind that we train teachers and non-scientists. However, when asked to put them in play in a daily situation -in our case, describe the ideas contained in a press release- we see that, like other students with more scientific training, they do not use the scientific method and ignore the difference between data and opinions and the role of the first ones to prove the affirmations, making a majority use of their beliefs and opinions.