Examining Kindergarten Children's Persistence, Testing, and Optimizing in a Gear Engineering Task

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Developing STEM Thinking Equitably

Abstract

Introducing 5- to 7-year-olds to the engineering-design-process (EDP) is an important objective of early science education. Studies indicate that children often miss testing and optimizing as parts of the EDP and do not persist in making solutions better. The present study explores how children’s goal awareness, self-evaluation ability, domain-specific science content knowledge, mental rotation and figural reasoning ability relate to their persistence, testing and optimizing behavior and to solution quality. 41 children worked on a gear engineering task. Goal awareness was positively related to solution quality. However, most children required support to retrieve the goal specifications. Moreover, self-evaluation was negatively related to persistence.

Authors

• Timo Reuter, University of Koblenz-Landau

• Miriam Leuchter, University of Koblenz-Landau