Children’s and Teachers’ Experiences of and Perspectives on Play in Primary Science

This study investigates children’s and teachers’ experiences of and perspectives on play in primary science in Singapore. It specifically focuses on the nature and dominant types of all talk and science talk among children and teachers during play. The children in this study were Primary 3 pupils (aged 8-9 years old). A mixed-method, case-study research design was used, incorporating 15 minutes of free play into two science lessons. Observational data in the form of video and audio recordings were collected from five classes of children in three schools (n= 183 children). Five Primary 3 science teachers were interviewed individually using semi-structured interviews, once before the first play session and once after the last. Three groups of pupils in each class (n=15) were purposively sampled to participate in group interviews after all the play sessions. Emerging themes from both sets of findings suggest the feasibility and value of using play as a pedagogical tool in primary science classrooms in Singapore, catering to most pupils. The findings of this study showed that the children did most of the talking but that they mainly engaged in non-science talk. The teachers’ role changed during the free-play sessions and they talked less to allow the children to exercise free-choice. The contribution to knowledge of this study was the creation of a new observation schedule based on the Falk and Dierking’s Contextual Model of Learning and Simon et al.’s discourse analysis framework, to study the utterances of children and teachers. This study contributes empirical data about using play to learn science on the topic of magnetism for children in middle childhood. With both children’s and teachers’ perspectives being looked at and studied, the findings contribute to our understanding of how future play-based science lessons might be designed and carried out.