Earth's Structure: A Qualitative Study

Discussion
The aim of this study was to investigate if age and gender are associated with children’s understanding of the earth’s structure. It was hypothesised that: older children will have a better scientific understanding of the structure of the earth compared to younger children, boys will have a better scientific understanding of the structure of the earth compared to girls, and younger children will construct different mental models of the earth compared to older children. The results of the study supported the first hypothesis as the older group had a substantially higher percentage of sphere model responses compared to the younger group. The results did not support the second hypothesis as the percentages of sphere model responses …show more content…
73.25% of the combined older group constructed the sphere model with the remaining 26.75% distributed across the five alternate models. On the other hand, 80.2% of the combined younger group constructed alternate models, and the remaining 19.8% constructed the sphere model. These results are consistent with Vosniadou and Brewer’s 1992 study. The much higher percentage of alternate models constructed by younger children can be explained by the stage of mental development they are in. Younger children construct initial models due to the constraints of their presuppositions before being exposed to scientific information. Subsequently, younger children construct synthetic models as an attempt to synthesise the new information that the earth is a sphere with their existing presuppositions (Vosniadou & Brewer 1992). Both the younger and older children in our study seemed to have a higher percentage of sphere model responses and lower percentage of alternate model responses compared to the children in Vosniadou and Brewer’s 1992 study. This may be a testament to the differences in education systems between America and Australia, or that children have become more knowledgeable about the earth’s structure over