Promoting Scientific Reasoning in Pre-Schoolers via Language Development

• In Event: 2-203 - Teacher-led Interventions to Promote School Readiness

Integrative Statement

Currently many efforts are being made to promote children’s development at preschool age. In the study reported here, an intervention program was designed in order to improve the language-teaching strategies of kindergarten teachers. The training program “Feeling, thinking, talking” for kindergarten teachers is supposed to foster emotional and cognitive development in children via language development. Wellington and Osborn (2001) assume that there is an interaction between scientific reasoning and language skills. Yet it is an open question, whether a training program at preschool age can improve both language and scientific reasoning.
The training program evaluated in this study consists of five modules. The first informs the teachers about language development, the second about using languages strategies, the third combines language skills with talking about emotions and the fourth offers ideas on how to talk about scientific reasoning with children. The last module concentrates on the transfer to everyday life in kindergarten.
Although the intervention was done with the kindergarten teachers, the aim of the present study was to evaluate possible effects on the scientific reasoning of the participating children. We used three tasks to measure scientific reasoning, inspired by the Klahr and Dunbar (1988) model: generate hypotheses (1), design experiments, (2) and reaction to experimental outcomes (3). In the intervention group, 136 children participated (53% girls, 46% with a bilingual or multilingual background) with a mean age of 49.71 months (SD 6.93) at the beginning. The control group consisted of 123 children (44% girls, 50% with a bilingual or multilingual background) with a mean age of 49.86 months (SD 7.41). Before and after the intervention with the kindergarten teachers (time between measuring periods M=7.53 months (SD=1.35)), children were presented with the same battery of scientific reasoning tasks: To assess if children could generate hypotheses, they had to find out which characteristics are important for being a member of a fantasy animal family. For the second task, designing experiments, they had to create ideas about baking a very good cake a second time, not knowing which ingredients are the important ones. To test the reaction to experimental outcomes, the children had to evaluate correlational patterns (relationship between different chewing gums and dental health).
Results reveal that there were training effects in the tasks measuring generation of hypotheses (1) and reaction to experimental outcomes (3). The task for designing experiments (2) revealed no effect for the intervention group as a whole, but there was a triple interaction reflecting a positive effect for children with a bilingual or multilingual background. In contrast to the children in the control group, these children were able to improve their skills. The effects of all the improvements measured in the children were small. Results will be discussed with regard to the possibility of improving scientific reasoning via language development. Opportunities and limitations of a training program for kindergarten teachers and its transfer on children’s development will be debated.

Authors

• Merle Skowronek, University of Hildesheim
  Presenting Author

• Annika Sting, University of Hildesheim
  Non-Presenting Author

• Claudia Maehler, University of Hildesheim
  Non-Presenting Author