The construction of astronomy knowledge in elementary school children : influence of the cultural context

The aim of this paper is to present a review about conceptual development in astronomy and to deepen the study of the nature of children's knowledge according to their cultural context. The article will first describe two competing theories concerning knowledge acquisition in astronomy : the mental models' theory and the fragmented knowledge one, as well as the way each approach treats the question of cultural mediation. The relative roles of intuitions, cultural information and explicit school learning on the acquisition of scientific knowledge about the shape of the Earth and the day/night cycle will be then discussed from a cross-cultural perspective. For this, a detailed presentation of the work carried out on the African continent will illustrate certain recent advances in this field of study. In particular, we will show that children growing up in a cultural context that places little emphasis on scientific knowledge, develop more hybrid explanations (mixing naive and scientific elements) despite a scientific teaching at school, than children receiving testimonies converging at school and out of school. Thus, the development of scientific knowledge seems to depend on the cultural context and the interactions between the different sources of knowledge accessible to the child.