What happens when water evaporates? An inquiry activity with primary school children

Abstract

This paper is the result of a pedagogical intervention project carried out in a primary school. The intervention took place in a 4th grade class (n=24) and involved an inquiry-based approach to the teaching of the curricular topic “water phase changes”. The project employed an action research methodology whose main goals were: a) to promote inquiry-based science teaching; b) to describe and analyse the process of the construction of meanings in relation to the phenomena under study, and c) to evaluate the learning acquired by the students. At the end of each lesson, a class diary was prepared - a descriptive and reflective narrative compiled from the field notes and audio recordings made during participant observation in the classroom. It was one of these class diaries that served as basis for this article, which describes and analyses the process of scientific meaning construction occurred in the classroom, around the phenomenon of "water evaporation". The results of the assessment on the learning acquired show that the vast majority of students developed an atomistic model to explain the phenomenon of water evaporation, in which liquid water turns into small, invisible particles (water vapour), which become part of the air around us. This model is consistent with the notion of conservation of matter.