Effectiveness of a school scientific model to address buoyancy in the training of prospective early childhood teachers

Buoyancy is a recurring topic in early childhood education and provides an opportunity to introduce scientific modelling. This study is framed within the need to improve the training of prospective early childhood teachers (PECT) in this scientific practice and examines the effectiveness of a teaching intervention that models the buoyancy of objects in water as balanced forces. The research analyses responses from a pre-test and post-test questionnaire administered before and after the intervention. A qualitative content analysis was used to categorise responses. In general, a positive progression was observed in the models used by the PECT to explain buoyancy as balanced forces. Most PECT correctly assimilated that the upthrust exerted by water is equivalent to the weight of the amount of water displaced by the object, and that this upthrust therefore depends on the volume of the portion of the object submerged. The conclusion is that, with interventions such as this, it is possible (1) to initiate the PECT in the practice of scientific modelling as part of their training to teach science at early childhood education, and that (2) they assimilate a school scientific model to be able to explain buoyancy.