INSTRUMENTS FOR DATA COLLECTION

In order to collect data one needs appropriate instruments that would capture data optimally. In a study such as this thesis, the tools for data collection were custom- designed. The interviews, following on the science demonstrations, were a hybrid of the stimulated recall method, in that children were asked about the event in which they had participated immediately before the interview (Moustakas 1994). I decided on this type of interview to gain a deeper understanding of the participants’ experience of the science demonstrations and thereby capturing aspects of their ‘theories’ and their conceptual structures. In these interviews the children, as participants, could ‘speak for themselves’ (Babbie & Mouton 2010). For the design of the interview protocols for both phases of the fieldwork, I drew on the work of Carey (2009) and Vosniadou (1994) to inform the protocols. My reasoning was that the questions in the protocol could help the children to focus on the topic. Carey (2015) and others (Zaitchik et al. 2016) used a battery of tests to elicit the ‘state’ of children’s theories of vitialist biology from the participants. As explained in Section 2.4 this battery of three tests aims to describe the theory of vitalist biology that an individual holds. First, these authors use the ‘animism interview’ (Carey 1985b; Larendeau & Pinard 1962; Piaget 1929) to probe the meaning of ‘alive’ and to establish what the individual categorises as a ‘living thing’. Following these open-ended questions participants are asked to judge a series of named entities - whether these are alive or not. The second test is a ‘death interview’ (Carey 1985b; Slaughter 2005; Slaughter & Lyons 2003; Zaitchik et al. 2013) that probes the difference between entities that are alive and entities that are considered dead. The

third task, the body parts interview (Carey 1985b; Slaughter 2005; Slaughter & Lyons 2003), asks the participants to name the position and function of a series of organs and other body parts. The participants are also asked to predict what would happen if a person did not have a certain organ or body part. For both interview protocols, I decided against using the exact same battery of tests but rather decided to design a series of questions similar to those of the biology battery that could yield similar responses. Merriam (1998), cautions researchers that rigid adherence to predetermined questions may restrict researchers from gaining deeper insights into the perspective of participants. However, the interview protocols in the study remained constant across the various participants for reasons of reliability.

For the purposes of this study I aimed for more spontaneity and openness and decided to let the children elaborate on their answers as freely as possible. For the first phase of the fieldwork, children were presented with familiar objects, similar to those of the first task in the biology battery, and asked whether the object is alive or not. The children were then asked to explain their answers. In the second phase of fieldwork, a set of task-based interviews were designed in the same vein as Piaget (1929) did with his early research, using clinical interviews. In these task-based interviews, the young learners were asked to group a set of 20 pictures, each representing either an animal, plant or abiotic factor such as soil, air or water, into two groups. The rationale was that children who held a normative theory of vitalist biology would recognise the differences between biotic and abiotic factors and subsequently group the pictures from the same categories together.

A similar approach was followed in the design of the interview protocols for the observational astronomy tasks. Vosniadou and colleagues (Vosniadou & Brewer 1992; Vosniadou 1994; Diakidoy, Vosniadou & Hawks 1997) studied children’s naïve frameworks of observational astronomy by asking a series of factual and generative questions. The factual questions included questions that required of participants to provide information that would inform the researchers of their exposure to theoretically important facts, but did not require the participants to apply these facts in a specific context. Examples of such questions would include “what shape is the earth?” and “what colour is the earth” etc. The generative questions expected the participants to apply their knowledge to a specific context and provided the researchers with opportunities to gather information about the participants’ underlying conceptual structures. Examples of these questions are, “if you were to walk for many days in a

straight line, where would you end up?” and, “Would you ever reach the end of the earth?” These questions required the participants to generate a mental representation of the earth which would inherently contain information about its shape and relationship with other celestial objects. In this study I also used a combination of factual and generative questions to elicit the underlying conceptual structures of the participants.

For the first phase of the observational astronomy interviews, children were asked a series of questions relating to the shape of the earth and the interaction of the sun and the moon with the earth. The children were then asked to elaborate on and explain their answers. For the second phase of fieldwork for observational astronomy the children were asked to create models of the earth, the sun and the moon, using clay. The participants were then asked a series of questions attempting to find out what their reasoning was. The participants were then asked to demonstrate the relationships between the earth, the sun and the moon.