A COMPARATIVE APPROACH TO THE REPRESENTATION OF LIGHT FOR FIVE-, EIGHT- AND TEN-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN: DIDACTICAL PERSPECTIVES

Children's mental representations of physical concepts and phenomena are often different from those of scientists. In this paper we investigate the issue of understanding light in space as an entity by schoolchildren aged 5 (127 subjects), 8 (142 subjects) and 10 (132 subjects), before they receive any systematic teaching in school. This research was conducted through individual interviews in which the children were asked to talk about light and its results and to locate it in various experimental situations. The results of this study show that even though all the children of all ages have difficulty understanding light as an entity in space, as they grow older they make significant progress in disconnecting light from light sources. These findings allow us to seek out educational perspectives on the understanding of the concept of light in organised scholastic environments.