Features of young pupils’ thinking when solving a novel physical problem: precausal reasoning, p-prims, mental models, analogies

Abstract According to constructivist theory of learning, learners’ initial knowledge is fundamental to the learning process. A better understanding of children’s mental representations and reasoning strategies at the beginning of their academic education can help us to teach them more effectively. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with groups of 4–5 children from the first, second, third, and fourth grades (from six to nine years old) of primary school in Hajdúnánás, Hungary. Children were asked to tell their opinions about novel problems that were embedded in a short story. The answers and the following discussions were recorded and analysed separately in case of the different grades. Our main goal was to examine if children are activating and using p-prims similar to those observed in older age groups by many researchers while trying to answer these novel problems. By analysing the recordings, we were able to find out that the features of usage of p-prims change with increasing age and because of the science education in schools. We did not find traces of a large and coherent conceptual framework, or naïve theory, but rather different forms of pre-causal reasoning that are more frequent in earlier ages.