Thinking About Play: Young Children's Spontaneous Experiments and Verbal Reasoning

• In Event: Understanding How Young Children Reason About Science

Abstract

Preschoolers spontaneously experiment during free play, and demonstrate learning from these experiments. However, whether children would choose to articulate hypotheses and plans for such experiments, or what they learned from them, remains unknown. Four-to-six-year-olds played with blocks that activated a “machine” on a touchscreen-tablet. Many children generated controlled experiments and described the cause-effect relationships they discovered given open-ended questions after play. When asked what they wanted to find out or do during their play, a significant number of children reported wanting to understand cause-effect relationships. This suggests that young children can appreciate and articulate the significance of causal hypotheses and discoveries during their play, and that early childhood science education might benefit by capitalizing on these abilities.

Authors

• Audrey Kittredge, University of Cambridge

• David Klahr, Carnegie Mellon University

• Kevin Willows, Carnegie Mellon University