Early childhood science practices observation tool (EC-SPOT): assessing science practices across multiple classroom contexts

ABSTRACT

Worldwide, there is growing recognition of the importance of science in early childhood education. Doing science’ or, more formally, science and engineering practices, is acknowledged as a critical component of early science education that requires support from the adults in children’s lives. Moreover, engaging in science practices helps build the foundations for active learning, problem-solving, and school readiness. Despite increased efforts to increase science in preschool classrooms the dearth of measurement tools restricts the ability of researchers to evaluate the efficacy of these efforts. This paper evaluates a new measure to assess preschool teachers’ science and engineering practices across multiple classroom contexts throughout the day. Data from 58 preschool teachers and 360 children demonstrate the reliability of the EC-SPOT in capturing teachers’ practices and validity evidence in relation to an external measure of children’s science knowledge as well as the sensitivity to intervention effects. The EC-SPOT critically expands the ability to capture science learning beyond typically limited formal science lessons, as it unfolds naturally and often in preschool children’s everyday classroom experiences. Both for evaluating and promoting higher quality science education in preschool programmes, the field needs better ways of capturing how adults recognise and encourage young children behaving as scientists.

KEYWORDS:

• Assessment
• early years/early childhood
• professional development

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the entire RISE research team (2015–2019), too numerous to name, whose dedication and care made the work possible, and our collaborators in this project – the administrators, teachers, families, and children of the ABCD Boston Head Start programme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The RISE Project was funded by the National Science Foundation [Grant numbers: 1221065; 1621161], the Brady Education Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, as well as by private support from Ellen R. Cohen to Tufts University.