Investigating Individual Variation in Children's Scientific Questions

• In Event: Child and Parent Discourse for Cognitive and Social-Emotional Learning

Abstract

Utilizing a social interactionist perspective, we explored individual variation in how teacher-child question-explanations exchanges develop during an extended scientific inquiry in an inquiry-based preschool classroom. Naturalistic videos of classroom interactions collected across three weeks were transcribed at the utterance-level for the teachers and 5 individual children. Utterances were coded first for delivery (question or statement) and next for content (e.g., causal, scaffolding). Most utterances were statements (77.71%); of the questions, most were information-seeking (fact-based or causal; 67.21%). The children did show individual differences; they asked varied proportions of information-seeking to noninformation-seeking questions which changed differently over time. These results add to work examining question-explanation exchanges in the classroom and support the importance of considering individual differences in early science learning.

Authors

• Hannah Puttre, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Amanda S Haber, Fairfield University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maliki Ghossainy, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author