Methodology

In order to achieve the vision and aims of ASF, programs are designed to work with teachers at government schools and to work with children directly at the centre. These programs adopts a learner-centric methodology helping the child to get exposed to fundamental principles following a concept-based design, experience, enquiry, and expression based implementation techniques and enables teacher to implement the same inside classroom. By learner-centric, we mean that the child is given the maximum opportunity to arrive at concepts by his/her own reasoning, with the teacher mostly acting as a facilitator. We believe that the science learning should be concept-based and should nourish the child's natural curiosity, and provide an opportunity to discover the fundamental concepts.

"Air is everywhere" is a statement found in many text books including third standard text book prescribed by Karnataka State syllabus. Scientist must have spent the whole of his lifetime to discover this seemingly straight forward one-liner. Such an important concept, if delivered to a child as a fact, without even an iota of explanation, it makes no impression on a child. It is important to conduct a discussion to accept the statement, illustrate the concept with simple experiments and to address the misconceptions a child can have about the words "Air" or "Everywhere".

"Science education is moving towards identifying the essential importance of learner's activity and involvement rather than as a passive, verbal reception from a teacher or text, or as a passive recording of experience." - Concept/Process-Based Science, Oregon Department of Education

Concept based learning is a method in which content and learning activities are designed based on a set of fundamental concepts and processes to be developed in children. The true science learning can happen only if there is a scope to observe, find patterns, analyse, hypothesize, verify, and conclude. These skills help the child not just to learn science but any subject or to apply in any real life situation.

For e.g. 'Liquids do not have a definite shape' - we need to break this concept down into fundamentals helping the child to understand the concept of shape, to experience definite or no definite shape concept and to express after he/she experience.

This learning process gives the child an opportunity to construct the concepts by themselves.

"Can a learning experience be presented to the learner? Or, must it be constructed by the learner? ...natural processes students must go through in the construction of concepts and understanding" - Concept/Process-Based Science, Oregon Department of Education

The proposed learning method provides experiences through performing experiments, activities, enquiry and example-based interactions. The designed model focuses on drawing the attention of a child by creating exciting experiences. This helps the child to increase the level of learning in the process of observation, analysis and conclusion.

For e.g. in the 'Air is everywhere' example, the child needs to experience a situation that illustrates the presence of air.

The experiences provided are such that a child can relate, assimilate and apply to everyday situations thus enabling him/her to learn science in all his experiences.

As the child starts to experience and the facilitator offers the direction to help him find the answers, there is a natural process of enquiry that begins in the child. For example, if the child is shown the bubble in a bottle of water, he/she may think the bubble is actually a water bubble instead of an air bubble.

There should be an opportunity for the child to express his/her views even if they are misconceptions. If the facilitator offers the right guidance through questions, examples, hints or answers the child reaches a state of enquiry.

In the above example, the facilitator may achieve this by asking a question 'What happens to the bubble if I remove little water from the bottle? Does it become big or small?' and performing this action. In this way, an opportunity is created for the child to self-verify his/her understanding.

Children love to express what they have learnt, through various channels. These can be articulation of perceptions and thoughts either spoken or written. Drawing is used as another technique to help children for better understanding and to help express what is learnt in a critical and precise way.

For e.g. if the child is drawing a bottle half filled with water in which a tube is inserted below the level of water, the illustration of this bottle with the tube and water has to be accurate. The child may draw the bottle with water and may indicate the tube above the level of water or may not indicate the water at all.

In these sessions, children are also encouraged to express what they did, what they observed, what they concluded through worksheets.

While we attempt to broadly classify various approaches of science teaching/learning methods here, all of these learning approaches are very strongly interconnected.