Despertant la curiositat cientìfica en Educació Infantil a través de la col·laboració de la familia, la escola i el centre universitari

The experience presented is an activity for preschool students. The aim is to arouse their scientific curiosity and encourage collaboration among members of the educational community by participating students' parents, and students and teachers from the Teacher Training College ‘Sagrada Familia’ in Úbeda. The experience consisted of a day of workshops for preschool students from the state school "San Ginés de la Jara" in Sabiote (Jaén). In those workshops the students discovered scientific phenomena through experiments.
A total of four workshops were carried out. They were based on scientific methodology in which children first observe, then formulate hypotheses, check the phenomenon and, finally, draw a conclusion.
To study the initiation to scientific curiosity in the group of children we used the qualitative technique of text production. Also, as the experience was designed as a training project through the collaborative work of several sectors of the community, we decided to study the evolution in the correlation between theory and practice that trainee teachers had by means of a pretest-posttest research design with a single group, on the basis of a questionnaire on solving problematic scientific situations. In the same way, we used a pretest-posttest design based on a questionnaire with open-ended questions to analyze whether the family context was a collaborative environment to foster scientific curiosity and to contribute to its development in a setting other than the school.
The results show that, after the intervention, a significant group of children remind one or more of the experiments of the workshops and are able to give a scientific explanation of them. The information drawn from the data collected in the family setting expand the results mentioned before, since it shows that, in some homes, children have applied scientific knowledge and, thus, the family context has become a collaborative environment to encourage scientific curiosity. Besides, the analysis of the data collected from trainee teachers show that most of them are capable of linking theory and practice after the experience.


Key words: Scientific methodology, collaborative work, scientific curiosity, initial training, permanent training.