Abstract
Research on the development of scientific reasoning has put the main focus on children’s experimentation skills, in particular on the control-of-variables strategy. However, there are more scientific methods than just experimentation. Observation is defined as an independent scientific method that includes not only the description of what is observed, but also all phases of the scientific inquiry, such as questioning, hypothesizing, testing, and interpreting. Previous research has shown that the quality of observations depends on specific knowledge in the domain. We argue that observation competency shares the domain-general ability to differentiate hypotheses from evidence with other scientific methods. The present study investigates the relations of both domain-general scientific thinking and domain-specific knowledge in biology with observation competency in grade K children. We tested relations between observation competency, domain-general scientific reasoning, domain-specific knowledge, and language abilities of 75 children (age 4;9 to 6;7). Both scientific reasoning and domain-specific knowledge proved to be significant predictors of observation competency, explaining 35% of the variance. In a mediation analysis, we found a significant indirect effect of language via these two predictors. Thus, the present results indicate that observation skills require not only domain-specific knowledge but also domain-general scientific reasoning abilities.
Highlights
Scientific thinking in children, which is understood as “the application of the methods or principles of scientific inquiry to reasoning or problem-solving situations” (Zimmerman, 2007), has been primarily studied with respect to experimentation skills
To the analysis of the overall observation competency scale, we had a look at the subscales and facets
In the original study by Kohlhauf (2013), the participants had been sorted into three levels of observation competency
Summary
Scientific thinking in children, which is understood as “the application of the methods or principles of scientific inquiry to reasoning or problem-solving situations” (Zimmerman, 2007), has been primarily studied with respect to experimentation skills. A growing body of recent research indicates that elementary school students and Scientific Reasoning in Biology even kindergarteners may, be able to distinguish hypotheses from evidence and reason about the relation between the two in simple, knowledge-lean tasks. Subsequent research by Piekny et al (2013b) showed that even 44% of 5-year-olds were able to pass this task. Kindergarteners seem to be able to choose adequate experiments (Leuchter et al, 2014; van der Graaf et al, 2015) and to interpret simple data sets (Koerber et al, 2005; Piekny et al, 2013a), unless when biased by prior beliefs (Koerber et al, 2005; Croker and Buchanan, 2011)
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