Developing Children's Early Competencies to Engage With Science

Abstract

Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to learners’ capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of evidence, critique methods, and other factors upon which evidence evaluation rests, evaluating sources and potential biases, and so on. Although the general discourse on education commonly suggests students are bad at such things, we review cognitive development research that demonstrates children display a variety of capabilities, even at early ages, that can be productively built upon by formal science instruction. We use this research to suggest some possibilities for formal schooling to develop children's capacities for evaluating claims within the pursuit of personally meaningful goals. We conclude with observations of useful directions our analysis opens to research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Susan R. Goldman, Rainer Bromme, Clark Chinn, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this article.

FUNDING

This article emerged from a conference on public engagement with science jointly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, award BR 1126/5-1) and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF, award 1065967), and organized by Rainer Bromme, Dorothe Kienhues, Susan R. Goldman, Anne Britt, and William Sandoval. The preparation of this article was partially supported by DFG awards to Sodian (SO 213/31-3) and Koerber (KO 2276/ 4-3), and by an NSF award to Sandoval (0733233). The views expressed here are ours, of course, and do not represent the official views of either agency.