Our research is based on the viewpoint that children are interested in activities related to discovering physical phenomena and that the question is basically how such activities can effectively be developed. It was carried out with preschool children in kindergarten and with children in elementary school. The aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches or treatments, and offering a possibility to introduce the children systematically and gradually to physical phenomena. The various physical phenomena were selected and presented to different groups of children.
Although different physical phenomena were presented, the problems dealt with were – as much as possible - of the same difficulty levels. Attention was also paid to presenting individual experiments in relation to the complexity of the phenomena and the children’s ability to understand them. We also took into account various other requirements such as simplicity of equipment and materials for experiments, simplicity of procedures, entertainment and variety, possibility of independent work, safety of children etc.
The results obtained by a comparative qualitative analysis of each research task as a whole, as well as of individual answers and reactions of the children show no significant difference between tasks. This may be due, however, to the complexity of the phenomena and to the efforts of making our approach to tasks as uniform as possible.
Nevertheless it is obvious that children are most interested in problem/solving in this field.
Experiments were carried out by two different age children groups, which made it possible to monitor and compare their reactions to new contents, as well as their abilities to understand them. The children’s questions and answers stimulated us to improve and design the experiments.
The research shows that if contents are adapted to the cognitive level of children and if experiments are structured in such a way that they stimulate the children’s intellectual activity, they contribute to the development of qualitatively different way of thinking (e.g. discovering of cause/effect relationships). It is this intellectual activity that also improves the understanding of various phenomena. The question that remains is what is the most efficient way to achieve these aims.