Experimentation skills in primary school: an inventory of children’s understanding of experimental design
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Abstract
Experimentation skills are a central component of scientific thinking, and many studies have investigated whether and when primary-school children develop adequate experimentation strategies. However, the answers to these questions vary substantially depending on the type of task that is used: while discovery tasks, which require children to engage in unguided experimentation, typically do not reveal systematic skills in primary school, choice tasks suggest an early use of adequate experimentation strategies. To acquire a more accurate description of primary-school experimentation, this article proposes a novel multiple-select paper-and-pencil inventory that measures children’s understanding of experimental design. The two reported studies investigated the psychometric properties of this instrument and addressed the development of primary-school experimentation. Study 1 assessed the validity of the item format by comparing 2 items and an interview measure in a sample of 71 third- and fourth-graders (9- and 10-year-olds), while Study 2 investigated the reliability and the convergent validity of the inventory by administering it to 411 second-, third- and fourth-graders (8-, 9- and 10-year-olds) and by comparing children’s performance in the 11-item scale to 2 conventional experimentation tasks. The obtained results demonstrate the reliability and validity of the inventory and suggest that a solid understanding of experimental design first emerges at the end of primary school.
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How to Cite
Osterhaus, C., Koerber, S., & Sodian, B. (2016). Experimentation skills in primary school: an inventory of children’s understanding of experimental design. Frontline Learning Research, 3(4), 56–94. https://doi.org/10.14786/flr.v3i4.220
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References
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Tschirgi, J. E. (1980). Sensible reasoning: A hypothesis about hypotheses. Child Development, 51, 1–10. doi:10.2307/1129583
Zimmerman, C. (2007). The development of scientific thinking skills in elementary and middle school. Developmental Review, 27, 172–223. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2006.12.001
Amsel, E., Klaczynski, P. A., Johnston, A., Bench, S., Close, J., Sadler, E., & Walker, R. (2008). A dual-process account of the development of scientific reasoning: The nature and development of metacognitive intercession skills. Cognitive Development, 23, 452–471. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.09.002
Bullock, M., Sodian, B., & Koerber, S. (2009). Doing experiments and understanding science: Development of scientific reasoning from childhood to adulthood. In W. Schneider & M. Bullock (Eds.), Human development from early childhood to early adulthood. Findings from the Munich Longitudinal Study (pp. 173–197). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bullock, M., & Ziegler, A. (1999). Scientific reasoning: Developmental and individual differences. In F. E. Weinert & W. Schneider (Eds.), Individual development from 3 to 12. Findings from the Munich Longitudinal Study (pp. 38–54). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Case, R. (1974). Structures and strictures: Some functional limitations on the course of cognitive growth. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 544–573. doi:10.1016/0010-0285(74)90025-5
Chen, Z., & Klahr, D. (1999). All other things being equal: Acquisition and transfer of the control of variables strategy. Child Development, 70, 1098–1120. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00081
Croker, S., & Buchanan, H. (2011). Scientific reasoning in a real‐world context: The effect of prior belief and outcome on children’s hypothesis‐testing strategies. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 29, 409–424. doi:10.1348/026151010X496906
De Boeck, P., & Wilson, M. (2004). A framework for item response models. New York, NY: Springer.
Hammann, M., Phan, T. T. H., Ehmer, M., & Grimm, T. (2008). Assessing pupils’ skills in experimentation. Journal of Biological Education, 42, 66–72. doi:10.1080/00219266.2008.9656113
Inhelder, B., & Piaget, J. (1958). The growth of logical thinking from childhood to adolescence. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Klaczynski, P. A. (2000). Motivated scientific reasoning biases, epistemological beliefs, and theory polarization: A two-process approach to adolescent cognition. Child Development, 71, 1347–1366. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00232
Koerber, S., Mayer, D., Osterhaus, C., Schwippert, K., & Sodian, B. (2015). The development of scientific thinking in elementary school: A comprehensive inventory. Child Development, 86, 327–336. doi:10.1111/cdev.12298
Koerber, S., Osterhaus, C., & Sodian, B. (2015). Testing primary-school children’s understanding of the nature of science. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 33, 57–72. doi:10.1111/bjdp.12067
Kuhn, D. (2000). Metacognitive development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 178–181. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00088
Kuhn, D. (2011). What is scientific thinking and how does it develop? In U. Goswami (Ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell handbook of childhood cognitive development (2nd ed., pp. 472–523). Oxford, UK: Wiley.
Kuhn, D., Garcia-Mila, M., Zohar, A., Andersen, C., White, S. H., Klahr, D., & Carver, S. M. (1995). Strategies of knowledge acquisition. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 60(4), 1–128.
Kuhn, D., & Phelps, E. (1982). The development of problem-solving strategies. In H. Reese (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 17, pp. 2–44). New, NY: Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/S0065-2407(08)60356-0
Lockl, K., & Schneider, W. (2002). Developmental trends in children’s feeling-of-knowing judgements. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 26, 327–333. doi:10.1080/01650250143000210
Masters, G. N. (1982). A Rasch model for partial credit scoring. Psychometrika, 47, 149–174. doi: 10.1007/BF02296272
Mayer, D., Sodian, B., Koerber, S., & Schwippert, K. (2014). Scientific reasoning in elementary school children: Assessment and relations with cognitive abilities. Learning & Instruction, 29, 43–55. doi:10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.07.005
Nehm, R. H., & Schonfeld, I. R. (2008). Measuring knowledge of natural selection: A comparison of the CINS, an open-response instrument, and an oral interview. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45, 1131–1160. doi:10.1002/tea.20251
Piekny, J., & Maehler, C. (2013). Scientific reasoning in early and middle childhood: The development of domain‐general evidence evaluation, experimentation, and hypothesis generation skills. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31, 153–179. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.2012.02082.x
Schauble, L. (1990). Belief revision in children: The role of prior knowledge and strategies for generating evidence. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 49, 31–57. doi:10.1016/0022-0965(90)90048-D
Siegler, R. S., & Liebert, R. M. (1975). Acquisition of formal scientific reasoning by 10- and 13-year-olds: Designing a factorial experiment. Developmental Psychology, 11, 401–402. doi:10.1037/h0076579
Tschirgi, J. E. (1980). Sensible reasoning: A hypothesis about hypotheses. Child Development, 51, 1–10. doi:10.2307/1129583
Zimmerman, C. (2007). The development of scientific thinking skills in elementary and middle school. Developmental Review, 27, 172–223. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2006.12.001