Math and Science Education: Concept Development and Learning Cycle

This assignment delves into the development of mathematical and scientific concepts in early childhood, emphasizing the role of everyday interactions and experiences. It highlights how children acquire fundamental concepts like addition, subtraction, and the properties of objects through exploration and play. The assignment also examines the learning cycle, consisting of exploration, concept introduction, and concept application, as a structured approach to facilitating children's understanding and retention of new information. This cycle involves introducing new situations, guiding discussions, and applying learned concepts to solve problems, making the learning process easier and more effective for young learners. The paper references key works in the field, including Piaget's theories on cognitive development and research on early STEM education.

Running head: MATH AND SCIENCE EDUCATION 1
MATH AND SCIENCE EDUCATION
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The term concept refers to an idea, notion or thought that is conceived in the mind.
Importantly, a concept is a vital building block of beliefs and thoughts which plays a
fundamental role in the cognition process (Sawyer, 2018). Concepts include ideas about the
environment, objects, others and self. For example a baby is given milk but as he/she grows
older, he/she is introduced to other drinks such as water. This instills the concept of drinks that
can be taken which keeps expanding with time (Piaget, 2015).
The development of mathematical concepts in small children takes place from everyday
interactions. This means that children acquire an understanding of basic concepts such as
addition and subtraction before going to school.Additionally, scientific concepts are developed
as early as infancy. For example young children are able to explore the world through the basic
senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. Additionally, as they gain their crawling,
standing and walking abilities young children make more discoveries about the environment
including the differences in sizes of different objects in relation to their own size. They also learn
about the weight by differentiating things they can lift and those that they cannot. Their curiosity
also leads them to play with various items out of which they discover that some roll while others
stay put. Though this they are able to learn the concept of different shapes (McClure et al.,
2017).
The learning cycle to build scientific concepts takes children through a scientific
investigation to develop their conceptual understanding. The cycle may be broken down into
three stages including exploration, concept introduction and concept application. Under the
exploration stage, a child is introduced to new situations through first hand experiences. For
example being able to sort things according to their color, use, shape and size. The second stage
involves building of ideas through guided discussions or texts. Finally, the Application stage

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involves the use of the information learnt in new situations such as solving a mathematical
problem. The three stages are important for children because they simplify the leaning process
by making it easy to understand, retain and apply what has been learnt (Duran,Haney &
Scheuermann, 2011).
References
Duran, E., Duran, L., Haney, J., & Scheuermann, A. (2011). A learning cycle for all
students. The Science Teacher, 78(3), 56.
McClure, E. R., Guernsey, L., Clements, D. H., Bales, S. N., Nichols, J., Kendall-Taylor, N., &
Levine, M. H. (2017). STEM Starts Early: Grounding Science, Technology, Engineering,
and Math Education in Early Childhood. In Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame

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Workshop. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. 1900 Broadway, New York,
NY 10023.
Piaget, J. (2015). The Grasp of Consciousness (Psychology Revivals): Action and Concept in the
Young Child. Psychology Press.
Sawyer, S. (2018, July). VI—The Importance of Concepts. In Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society (Vol. 118, No. 2, pp. 127-147). Oxford University Press.