Investigating the way 5-years old children distinguish the concepts ‘object’ and ‘material’ Is the ‘material’ overshadowed by the ‘object’?

Evmorfia Malkopoulou, George Papageorgiou, Anastasia Dimitriou

Abstract


This paper reports on a study of 5-year-old children ability to distinguish the concepts ‘material’ and ‘object’.  The aim of this study is to investigate how children of this age conceptualize these concepts along with their communication ability, the criteria they use to identify object and material and whether their criteria are relating to extensive or intensive properties.  For this purpose, three tasks of different complexity contexts were implemented by using objects and materials of daily life.  The sample of the study consists of 30 5-years old children.  Data were collected through semi-structured interviews.  The analysis of the data revealed that the way children conceptualize ‘object’ and ‘material’ is related with their communication ability, they have used extensive or intensive properties as criteria to identify and distinguish objects from materials. Moreover, when objects and materials were explicit children were able to distinguish them. In reverse, when objects consists of various characteristics ‘material’ overshadowed by the ‘object’.


Keywords


Material, object, distinguish, early-childhood

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References


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