STEM Learning with Young Children

CHAPTER 4

Ramps and Pathways Promote Communication Development

Beth Van Meeteren

The thrills and challenges children experience when they engineer and build ramp systems produce an audible buzz as children share or exchange information, news, or ideas. Ramps and Pathways’ STEM investigations become fertile ground for children to develop and use communication for a variety of purposes: to request additional materials, time, or space; problem-solve and share ideas; talk themselves through wicked problems; document; state a claim, explain, and argue; and celebrate success. This chapter explores ways teachers can create and work within a STEM environment that fosters the development of visual, verbal, and written forms of communication.

COMMUNICATION IS A CENTRAL STEM PRACTICE

To become proficient in science and engineering, students need opportunities to:

ask questions and define problems;
plan and carry out investigations;
analyze and interpret data;
construct explanations and design solutions;
engage in argument from evidence; and
obtain, evaluate, and communicate information (NRC, 2012).

Time spent on developing these practices positively affects children’s learning (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Fox-Turnbull, 2010; Moll, 1992; Perret-Clermont, 1980). Establishing an expectation of negotiation in the classroom provides a tool for inquiry from the very beginning of a child’s school experience. Kuhn and McDermott (2013) define negotiation in inquiry as a process whereby students make claims that are backed up with data and evidence and, as students’ claims are challenged, students strengthen their argument with information from prior knowledge or data collected from the investigation.

R&P investigations compel young children to grapple with forms of Kuhn and McDermott’s (2013) stages of negotiation: “self-negotiation,” or verbalizing personal understandings of what they observe; “peer-to-peer negotiation,” when students share and compare information with peers in small groups; and eventual “write to learn” behaviors of individually reflecting and recording what they have figured out. Negotiating within R&P demands that children communicate with many audiences such as peers, teachers, family, or classroom visitors through a variety of media.

Communicating to Cooperate

The development of children’s communication is contingent upon the socio-moral atmosphere developed through the teacher–student relationship. In traditional classrooms, teachers often view themselves as the authority and direct the activities, rarely allowing students to make any decisions on their own. This results in a discourse pattern of call and response with the correct response determined by how closely it aligns with the teacher’s thinking. However, as Piaget (1973) pointed out, such a classroom atmosphere produces intellectual and moral heteronomy, limiting students’ ability to make their own decisions. Children become dependent upon the teacher and do not exercise their own thinking. They do not feel a need to communicate their ideas.

To enable children to develop problem-solving abilities and interest in communicating about those problems, Piaget recommended a shift from the traditional teacher–student relationship. In order for children to become confident and active problem-solvers, capable of explaining their thinking, Piaget insisted that teachers needed to provide opportunities to foster children’s moral and intellectual autonomy. This includes the ability to take different perspectives into consideration and make decisions based on one’s own thinking (Piaget, 1965). In this autonomous atmosphere, the teacher considers the children’s points of view and encourages them to consider one another’s (DeVries & Zan, 2012). Children experience a dialogic classroom where they learn patterns of language to cooperate, state a claim, negotiate in scientific discourse, and come to consensus (Johnston, 2012).

A way to begin sharing decisionmaking is to include children in rule-making (Geiken, Van Meeteren, & Kato, 2009) or setting guidelines in building R&P. This requires the teacher to maintain a leadership role as he or she guides the process by asking, “How can we work within this space to build ramps? What kinds of things do you think will keep everyone happy and working?” As children contribute, the teacher can continue to probe, asking children to expand and clarify, modeling a desire to understand and value ideas.

You said we should write “be kind to each other.” What would that look like in the Ramps and Pathways center?

Asking for clarification helps the children examine the center and its operation from their perspective and take ownership. It also implies that the teacher has confidence in the children’s ability to regulate and operate the center.

The ideas are written in children’s words on chart paper. Every child has a vested interest in what is recorded and is finely attuned to and interested in how to express opinions and ideas in writing. Rule-making becomes a productive interactive writing session where children pay close attention to how their speech can be represented in print.

Because children are the creators of the guidelines, they ensure that the guidelines are followed. We have seen many occasions where children have pulled peers over to where the rules are posted and read them aloud when there has been a disagreement. When further complications in the center demand reworking a guideline, children experience their role in writing amendments. Children are immersed in the act of writing for a specific purpose and audience as well as the writing process of drafting, revising, editing, polishing, and publishing (Graves, 1994).

Working together promotes perseverance and autonomy. Work conversations can help children develop perseverance and autonomy when they encounter challenges. To scaffold a child who is becoming frustrated with lack of success, the teacher can model using self-talk to deal with frustration:

It sure is frustrating when it’s not working, but you are still looking closely to see what is happening so you can fix it. You are not giving up!

Other times, the teacher can make a suggestion to persuade the child to examine a problem from another perspective:

It doesn’t seem to be working that way. I wonder if it would make a difference if you tried something else.

I wonder if you looked at the structure from this angle if you can see what is going wrong.

Times of frustration can provide perfect opportunities to introduce and nurture collaborative thinking to solve problems. The teacher can cultivate these collaborations by making suggestions such as these:

I remember last week Joe had the same kind of problem. Do you suppose you could ask him to take a look at this to see what he did to solve the problem?

Have you noticed anyone else who may be able to help you figure this out? Is there a way you could get them to help? Would you like me to help you ask them?

When the teacher helps children understand that it is okay to ask for help, they find it is beneficial to work and learn as a team. Doing so builds a learning community where problems are a natural part of learning for everyone and a supportive community of learners is available to help solve those problems.

Executive function and project work. Coordinating the designing and building of R&P systems demands sophisticated development of the executive functions of inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. The development of executive functions plays a crucial role in success in literacy, mathematics, and later STEM learning (Blair & Razza, 2007; Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009; Diamond, 2013; Shaul & Schwartz, 2014).

R&P experiences are much like project work (Katz & Chard, 2000) and provide children with a common focus, motivation, and opportunities for conversation where vocabulary and language is enhanced (Beneke, 2010). By providing more opportunities for conversations around these experiences, we enable children to develop deeper conceptual understanding and a large and richly structured vocabulary at an early age, which can support their reading comprehension skills in later grades (Mol & Neuman, 2014).

Promoting Talk During Ramps and Pathways

Children are compelled to engage in self-talk and verbal exchanges when they design and build ramps. This is encouraged in dialogic classrooms by teachers who understand the importance of talk in developing vocabulary and language patterns. The research of Hart and Risley (2003) pointed out the role of adult–child verbal interaction in establishing vocabulary and language patterns. Prior to school, children develop vocabulary, language, and interaction styles similar to those of their caregivers that may or may not match the language of the child’s school culture. The child’s home language experiences differ not only in terms of number and kinds of words heard, but also in regard to language that encourages, or discourages, independent thinking and learning. Hart and Risley’s study concluded that educational interventions must not only address lack of knowledge or skill in using the school’s cultural language, but must also consider experiences that encourage habits of seeking, noticing, and incorporating more complex experiences, all essential to developing scientific and engineering practices (NRC, 2013). R&P provides the perfect venue for such language development.

As teachers observe children building, they may collect language samples. Analysis may reveal increasing lengths of utterances, and teachers can track oral language development (Clay, 2005). Analysis also reveals a child’s preconceptions about how the world works: precursors to understanding physics. Informed with this nuanced understanding of the child, the teacher can intervene with meaningful comments to expand the child’s vocabulary and conceptual understanding:

I notice your marble rolls quickly on the steep ramp, or the ramp that has one end much higher.
I see you chose to use a heavy marble, a marble with more weight to it. It seems to be rolling farther than the lighter marble.
You seem to be building your structure to be stable and sturdy. It doesn’t fall or collapse when you lean on your ramp.

When teachers provide specific feedback on children’s work, children are more apt to respond and continue conversations with the teacher and peers, thus improving their skills in communication. For example, at the beginning of the year in my 1st-grade classroom, I observed Alex creating a slope or incline that caused a marble to move down a track. In conversation with me he said, “When I bend the track, the marble rolls down.” Alex lacked a word to describe the incline. Working nearby, Shayla joined the conversation, using the world tilt in the context of the incline. Soon, Alex was using the word tilt in place of bend. In a dialogic classroom, or a classroom where conversations are expected and nurtured, children are free to talk with other children as they work. Within these conversations, children expand on one another’s word usage, vocabularies, and quality of phrasing.

This is equally true for native English speakers as well as dual-language learners (DLLs) (Cohen & Uhry, 2007; Fawcett & Garton, 2005; Mashburn, Justice, Downer, & Pianta, 2009). Teachers in the United States as well as in countries abroad have told us that R&P experiences were of great benefit to DLL students (see also Chapter 5).

While engaging in communication with young children, it is important to remember that understanding one another is the primary goal. The introduction of complex vocabulary should serve to expand this understanding, not create barriers. We recommend refraining from using scientific language that the children do not conceptually understand. Avoid words like acceleration, momentum, and velocity because terminology can have different meanings for different people, and may be inconsistent with the definitions of the scientific community. It is also wise to stay away from statements like “Friction makes the marble slow down.” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman (1985) was frustrated with how science textbooks asked children to memorize correct answers such as “Energy makes it move.” Such answers are hollow and empty of meaning. Instead, Feynman suggested teaching children to describe what they observe in their own language. For example, a teacher could say, “Tell me what you notice about how the marble is moving.” Children can answer with their own words with definitions they understand: “The marble is slowing down because it keeps bumping into the bumps on the carpet.” Once they have a deep understanding of what is going on, children can be introduced to the term friction and how it is related to the interaction of the marble and the carpet as the marble rolls across the carpet.

Communicating to Share Ideas and Problem-Solve

Professional scientists and engineers draw upon a vast network of knowledge and expertise they have amassed throughout their education and careers in preparing for their next research plan and project. Because of this, they have developed efficient protocols or systems to communicate with one another to use time and materials wisely. In engineering, this is known as the engineering design process. When professional engineers are given a job to do, their first task is to communicate with one another to identify the needs and constraints of the job. They determine what has already been done, and they develop possible solutions. Using their knowledge and expertise in physics and properties of materials to determine what they believe is the best solution, they build a prototype and test, evaluate, and improve the design as needed. Engineers do not use the engineering design process in a linear fashion, but rather enter in and out of phases intermittently as the project demands.

Attempts to include engineering in K–12 has resulted in a simplified definition of the engineering design process. Although the simplified engineering design process may work with older students, holding preschool and primary grade children accountable to it is extremely problematic. Young children are still self-negotiating and verbalizing what they observe and understand about how the world works. They have not had enough experiences to acquire the knowledge and expertise or even yet developed the cognitive capacity to consider all the constraints, brainstorm multiple ideas, and select the best one. Children’s excitement about creating, testing, and improving their ideas helps inform their understanding of how the world of objects works (Van Meeteren, 2013).

Communication within these experiences allows young children to acquire the necessary knowledge and expertise to engage in more formal engineering behaviors in later grades. Until then, it is more essential for the teacher to use conversation to develop self-negotiated concepts about how the world works. Through conversation, the teacher can model wondering, noticing details, and encouraging the child to slow down and reflect upon the reasoning that went into the building of the structure. The child’s conceptual understanding can be observed and recorded by the teacher. Educating the teacher on the workings of the structure, the child develops a sense of confidence and accomplishment.

As the center operates, the children’s developing ideas are powerful opportunities to help the children engage in scientific discourse. At least twice a week or more, we found children were interested in discussing ideas about ramp structures as a whole class. Sometimes these discussions were impromptu and took place when a powerful discovery was made; other times they were used as content for mini-lessons about writing. Both served as prime opportunities to engage in literacy development.

When children made a discovery in constructing or engineering a ramp structure, or encountered a perplexing problem, we would often gather around the structure itself. The builders were urged to present their structure and their idea or the problem they were trying to overcome. The teacher’s role was to help moderate discussion and provide models for disagreement that would help children look at problems from different points of view and not escalate into personal arguments. This often meant the teacher rephrased statements for the children.

USING QUESTIONING TO HELP MODERATE DISCUSSION AND DISSENTING OPINIONS

The following exchange between a teacher and a child demonstrates how the teacher asked questions and rephrased the child’s statements to help guide and facilitate perspective taking as children solve problems during ramp construction.

Juanita: You wrong! That’s not going to work.

Teacher: You mean you disagree with how the ramp structure is arranged? Tell us why you disagree with the construction. What problem do you see happening?

Juanita: You can see that won’t work.

Teacher: You can see something wrong from where you are standing? I wonder if we got behind you and looked at it from the same place you are looking at, if that would help us see something different. Let’s try.

Teacher to builder: What do you think? Do you see something you might need to adjust? Do you agree with Juanita that it won’t work? Isn’t it interesting how looking at the problem from another angle can give us such different ideas? Thanks for pointing that out, Juanita.

Through the teacher’s modeling of how to politely disagree and express dissenting opinions, the children learned to use language that permitted peers to observe more closely or from different perspectives. There were more exchanges and attempts to clarify ideas rather than attempts to overpower. They were a united community of learners engaged in deep investigation to make sense of how the world works.

Many times, as children explained how their ramp structures worked, they would offer generalizations within their explanations. These could be turned into discussions where they could engage in scientific argumentation.

In this way, the teacher works to help children both explain how they are thinking as well as consider ways to argue their thinking. Eventually, they will come to see that speed and the degree of the incline are related and that they are both right. The steeper the incline, the faster and farther the marble will travel. It also introduces the idea of creating diagrams and using drawings to represent and communicate thinking. This encourages attention and use of informational text, a genre that is far too absent from early childhood classrooms (Duke, 2000) and a genre that is problematic for many readers in later grades. Early exposure to informational text in authentic contexts helps children learn how informational text works and why it is necessary.

DISCUSSION USED TO ENGAGE SCIENTIFIC ARGUMENTATION

The following discussion illustrates how children can actively engage in scientific argumentation.

Moira: If you want the marble to go all the way to the end, you have to make the first ramp steep.

Teacher: Are you saying that a steeper ramp makes the marble go farther?

Moira: Yes. The steeper, the farther.

Kajeil: I disagree. I think the faster the marble goes, the farther it goes.

Tiamarah: Well, if it is steeper, the marble will go faster too.

Teacher: I’m starting to get lost. Let’s try to organize our thinking. Moira, you first said for the marble to roll all the way to the end, the first ramp has to be steep. Can you draw on this paper what a steep ramp would look like?

Moira draws.

Teacher: About how many blocks do you suppose it would take to make the ramp that steep? Could we hold a block up to the drawing to get an idea?

Moira holds up a unit block to the drawing.

Teacher: I’m wondering if we make a mark here to show a unit block, we can draw some more marks to show how many unit blocks we are using. Do you think people looking at this are going to know these are blocks? Let’s try labeling them “blocks.” I’ll draw a line from the word to the marks so they know what that is . . .

Communicating STEM Ideas Through Writing and Reading Tasks

Literacy skill acquisition plays a dominant role in early childhood curriculum. R&P provides an authentic context for children to learn to write and read as they document what they are doing and thinking. This documentation can take the form of sketches, digital photos, video, or writing created by children or co-created with their teachers.

Even before children understand the alphabetic principle, they are eager to communicate their ideas about ramp structures. Occasionally, children will spontaneously draw their ramp structures. Teachers can capitalize on these occasions by talking with children about their drawings and use the opportunity to introduce children to informational text. After asking permission to label parts of the drawing with the child’s help, the teacher can ask the child about specific parts of the drawing and the functions of each part. For example, the teacher could say:

I see you have quite a few parts to your structure. Can you show me where I would put the marble to start? Is it okay if I write “start” here so I can remember? Let’s see … “start” begins with the /s/ sound…. Help me remember what letter makes the /s/ sound.

The teacher can slowly enunciate each phoneme while writing its grapheme. Pointing to the completed word, the teacher and student can read it together. In this way, the teacher models that print has meaning, written words represent spoken words, and certain symbols represent certain sounds in our speech. These repeated experiences help children develop the concept of the alphabetic principle and they soon begin to experiment with recording their own thoughts.

Ramp structure photos. We found that taking pictures of children as they build and printing out single photos or a series of photos highly motivates children to reflect and write about their work. This documentation can take many forms. Single pictures may be used as opportunities to label the child’s work in the same way the child’s drawing can be labeled.

Child interviews. Another way to use single pictures is to interview the child about the picture. Be sure to be selective when asking interview questions. You want to scaffold the child’s learning and development, so timing is important. Asking too many questions would exhaust the child as well as prevent the student from continuing to work, so we recommend choosing only a few. It is equally critical for the teacher to interview children about their ramp structures using a relaxed, nonthreatening approach.

Conducting an interview does several things. First, it brings honor to the child’s work and enables teachers to demonstrate that they value the child’s work and thinking. Second, it puts the child into the position of reflecting on his or her work and engaging in metacognition, or thinking about his or her thinking. Third, it provides teachers with a window into children’s conceptual understanding of how the world works and informs teachers about how they can improve the educational environment to accommodate children’s needs. Fourth, it provides an opportunity for an authentic literacy lesson about the importance of including details in writing.

After the short interview, the teacher could invite the child to write about the picture to help the teacher remember the conversation. Another audience could be the child’s family. A third audience could be classmates who may want to rebuild the structure. Offering different audiences for the child’s writing requires the child to think from the perspective of the reading audience to determine the most important things to include in the piece.

If the child is still developing the alphabetic principle, the child can dictate to the teacher and the teacher acts as a scribe. If the child is developing sound/symbol relationships, the child can write on the page. The teacher can use this moment to celebrate what the child understands about how print works, pointing out the child’s conventional uses of beginning and/or ending sounds in the writing. Teachers can then challenge the child to think a bit harder about one specific feature of the writing, nudging him or her closer to conventions of writing and spelling.

SAMPLE INTERVIEW STATEMENTS AND QUESTIONS

Tell me what you are trying to do in this picture.

Help me understand what you are trying to get to happen in your structure.

Tell me what is working in your structure.

Tell me about the problems you had/are having in your structure.

How do you solve those problems?

Did anyone give some helpful suggestions for building?

Tell me about how you got the idea for your structure.

How did you start?

What was the hardest part?

What surprises did you have?

What part do you think is the most interesting?

Can you help me understand what this part does?

Can you help me understand what will happen when the marble goes here?

What do you plan to try next?

Are there any different kinds of materials you wish you had available?

The interview could also be completely verbal, recorded and possibly shared on a classroom wiki through a podcast or through email with family members. Another possibility is to collect video footage of the construction and presentation of a ramp structure. This could be uploaded to a platform such as VoiceThread, a web-based digital storytelling application that allows users to share photos, videos, text, and audio, and allows visitors to comment on the work through voice with a microphone, telephone, text, audio file, or video with a webcam. VoiceThreads can be shared with anyone in the world or kept private for a selected audience. It is a wonderful way to share a child’s learning with parents and family members.

Ramps and Pathways Documentation Boards

Uninformed observers of a classroom engaged in R&P may be confused and even dismissive of the children. A way to educate these observers is to construct documentation boards to tell the story, purpose, and conceptual development involved in R&P activities. In the process, teachers gain even more insight into the children’s conceptual knowledge and can use it for both formative and summative assessment. Also, if children are involved in creating the documentation, they gain even more authentic experiences with literacy.

Katz and Chard (1996) recommend that documentation include not just a presentation of the final product, but samples of the child’s work in progress. Written comments by the teacher or other adults can highlight important discoveries the children made along the way. Transcriptions of children’s discussions and comments and photos reveal how their conceptual understanding continued to develop (see Photo 4.1). The collection of documents on display reveal how the children planned, carried out, and completed the work (Katz & Chard, 1996).

As mentioned earlier, media such as VoiceThread enable teachers to create web-based documentation that can be shared with audiences beyond the physical classroom. However, we recommend creating documentation boards within the classroom or in the hallway as well. Such boards are a visible reminder to the teacher and students of the importance of the work they are doing. They can serve as a tool in reviewing and reflecting on earlier work, and planning new directions as well as providing additional practice in reading and writing. Collaborating with the children in creating a documentation board on a classroom bulletin board or in the hallway can help them tell the story of their rigorous work in R&P. Artifacts and evidence can highlight conceptual development in physics as well as behaviors and habits in creative design and engineering.

Photo 4.1. Teacher Observes a Child’s Strategy in Designing and Building a Support Structure

Creating a successful documentation board requires the teacher to consider the audience and purpose (Seitz, 2008). For example, if the teacher wants to illustrate how R&P aligns with math, science, engineering, and technology standards, he or she will select samples of children’s work that highlight this alignment. This could include photographs of children counting blocks to measure height or weighing spheres to compare weight, along with children’s comments and background information on how they used measurement to communicate within their R&P investigations.

If the desire is to illustrate pre-engineering thinking, a series of photographs documenting the evolution of a ramp system with written explanations of conceptual thinking at each stage of building is a powerful way to inform visitors of the rich learning involved. Collaborative creation of a documentation board can serve two purposes. First, it clearly explains the overall objective and value of R&P. Second, as children reflect on their learning, they describe their thought processes, providing further opportunity to deepen their conceptual understandings and creating yet another authentic context for developing literacy skills.

Readers and Writers Authentically Communicate About R&P

With increased attention to literacy scores in standardized tests, teachers and administrators may be reluctant to devote so much time, attention, and space to STEM activities such as R&P. By now, the reader should already have constructed how literacy learning is deeply embedded in integrated STEM investigations. STEM investigations support and enhance literacy development.

We have found that when children engage in R&P in a supportive environment, they learn to expect problems and expect to figure them out. They are open to taking risks in their work, expecting to learn from mistakes. This healthy respect for learning from mistakes transfers to literacy learning. Just as children become comfortable encountering problems in engineering their ramp structures and learning patterns in how the laws of physics work, they become comfortable encountering problems in their uses of literacy and learning patterns in how speech and print work. There is no longer an unrealistic expectation that everything they speak, read, and write must be perfect the first time; instead, they gain an understanding that learning to read and write and speak is a process that allows them to revise and refine their knowledge and use of literacy over time.

In far too many pre-K, kindergarten, and primary classrooms, performance in literacy is what defines a child’s success, because literacy is what is evaluated at the state level in early childhood. When the school environment is so heavily focused on the domain of literacy and children are restricted to one literacy activity after another throughout the school day, children who struggle but possess strengths in early STEM come to learn that their knowledge, expertise, and ideas are not valued or important. These creative children may find solace in activities such as block building offered at free choice time (which is becoming increasingly rare, even in kindergarten). However, the block center is seldom valued by the school culture and, if allowed, it is viewed as a way to keep children occupied until the teacher can do the important academic work with them in small-group instruction (Casey, Andrews, Schindler, Kersh, & Samper, 2008).

When they are offered experiences such as Ramps and Pathways, all children find a way to experience and celebrate success. Furthermore, we have found that children who languished in literacy early in the year, but experienced success in R&P, became motivated to learn the patterns of language to communicate their ideas, problems, and success with others. They work to develop conventions of Standard English in order to be understood. They acquire and use vocabulary specific to informational texts. Ramps and Pathways challenges children to learn to read and write a variety of text structures and develop foundational skills in print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics, word recognition, and fluency. Children write lists of materials they need, directions (procedural writing) for others to follow, signs to inform onlookers to look, but not touch. They sequence events as they order and describe a series of pictures of their work. They write to reflect, debate, and record ideas within a community of learners.

CONCLUSION

The engaging work of Ramps and Pathways creates an atmosphere where children are hungry for ways to share ideas. Often, these ideas involve science and engineering concepts that are relevant and meaningful to the children. Actually doing science and engineering requires use of mathematics, and skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and viewing to communicate effectively. In this way, content domains are fully integrated to where they are most meaningful and relevant to young learners (Kamii, Miyakawa, & Kato, 2004).

Many teachers may be reluctant to give up instructional time in literacy to allow children to experience the R&P curriculum. Instead of robbing the literacy instructional block, we found that Ramps and Pathways breathed life into the act of literacy itself. Children did not ignore literacy activities but rather demanded them in order to bolster their communication skills and share their R&P experiences with others. As an unexpected bonus, we found the increased perseverance that developed through R&P activities served children well and helped support their literacy development. As children became accustomed to their ramp structures not working the first time and trying something different to get them to work, they became accustomed to making mistakes in reading and writing, trying a different approach to make something work or make sense.

The inquiry skills children developed during R&P seemed to spill over into reasoning in reading comprehension and mathematics, agreeing with research that parallels science and literacy concepts (Cervetti, Pearson, Bravo, & Barber, 2006; DeVries & Sales, 2011; Padilla, Muth, & Lund Padilla, 1991; Yore, Bisanz, & Hand, 2003). Further discussion on STEM integration will be provided in Chapter 6.