Browsing by Author "Vuorinen, Maria"

This Bachelor's Thesis is intended to deepen the study of the effects of exploiting childrens books as educational tool, specificially used in science concepts and early childhood educa-tion. The aim is to find out how reading books and literacy based activities affects in chil-drens motivation and skills in science learning in kindergarten. Earlier studies have shown that books are really effective learning resource while teaching young children. Earlier stu-dies have also shown that especially girls do not like science concepts as much as boys do and females are under-represented in careers related to physical science, computer and in-formation science and engineering.. That is major problem because In future, we still need scientist more and more to answer serious threat´s like global warming. We also need scien-tist from bouth sex´s and it is really important to find out that using books can be the method of increasing childrens and specially girls motivation, competence beliefs, liking and interest in science. Thats why this bachelor´s thesis is intended to inform our understanding of children’s science learning and motivation across. The aim is also to clarify the researcher's view of these questions through a systematic literature review. The sources used were the latest scientific publications, dissertations, a few graduate theses and the underlying themes of this thesis. Data search was performed in databases where the University of Helsinki access and the Google Scholar search engine. The literature obtained from the literature review was studied using the content analysis method. The findings suggest that early meaningful participation in science is likely to promote girls and boys motivation for science and there was no difference in science skills between gen-ders. Kindergartener´s profit from participation in literacy-rich, inquiry-focused science expe-riences and books fit to science education well but there is few things which teachers will no-te. For example teaching by books should be accompanied by rich discussion and opportuni-ties for retellings and rereadings to avoid possible miss-understoods.