Early science education - Exploring preschool children's basic conceptual knowledge along with their involvement and preschool teachers' professional competence

Flores, Pamela (2022): Early science education - Exploring preschool children's basic conceptual knowledge along with their involvement and preschool teachers' professional competence. Dissertation, LMU München: Fakultät für Psychologie und Pädagogik

Abstract

Early science education has become a crucial element of preschool. In the last years, the inquiry-based educational approach has gained increasing attention as a suitable strategy to engage preschool children with scientific topics. First studies indicate that this approach has a positive effect on children’s learning experiences and outcomes, but there is still a dire need to investigate these two aspects simultaneously and explore the relation between them. The increasing importance of science in preschool entails new expectations for preschool teachers, which raises the question as to what type of knowledge they need to teach science to young children. Drawing from research with school teachers, it is believed that preschool teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge play a role in their instructional practices. Here again, however, research is still rather scarce. This thesis consists of three research studies that aim at contributing to the still growing research in the field of early science education, specifically in the domain of life sciences. These studies are complemented by a diverse set of science outreach activities oriented towards preschool teachers and children that aim at contributing to the improvement of early science education. Study 1 presents the development and evaluation of an instrument to examine young children’s understanding of the biological concept of structure and function in the form of one-on-one interviews. Through a two-tier item structure, it allows for the evaluation of children’s knowledge of the relation between structure and function as reflected by two different cognitive processes: their ability to match structures and functions (recognize), and their ability to explain these relationships (explain). The Rasch psychometric analysis that was conducted to evaluate measurement functioning includes the assessment of dimensionality, item and person reliabilities, step ordering, anchor quality, and Wright maps, which in turn consists of the evaluation of the ranges of item difficulty and person ability, test item targeting, and the position of all items along the difficulty scale. The Rasch technique allowed for the analysis of the item difficulties as a combination of their difficulty level in both tiers, resulting in a pool of 16 items that can be used in future studies. Study 2 centres around the effect of the inquiry-based educational approach on preschool children’s involvement and conceptual knowledge of structure and function, as well as the mediating role of involvement within this learning process. 59 children (mean age: 6 years, 3 months) participated in either an inquiry-based or a control learning activity on the topic of animals and plants of the forest. Their involvement was measured using an adapted version of the Leuven Involvement Scale and their conceptual knowledge using the instrument presented in study 1. Results show that the inquiry-based learning activity had no impact on children’s recognition of correct structures and functions of different organisms (recognize), but it had a significant effect on their conceptually based explanations (explain). Children of the inquiry group showed significantly higher levels of involvement during the learning activity than those of the control group. No indirect effect of the inquiry-based learning activity on children’s conceptual understanding through involvement after including the relevant covariates could be found. This study demonstrates that the inquiry-based educational approach is an appropriate strategy for engaging preschool children with science, as it has a positive effect on their learning experiences and outcomes. Study 3 focuses on the relation between preschool teachers’ professional knowledge and their instructional practice. 27 preschool teachers participated in a PD training that fostered either their content knowledge (CK-group), their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK-group), or both (CK+PCK-group), and then asked to conduct a learning activity with preschool children with provided materials. The instructional practice was conceptualized as consisting of a content dimension and an inquiry dimension, which consists of the subdimensions questioning, hypothesizing, testing, describing, and interpreting. The CK+PCK-group was significantly better than the PCK-group in the content dimension but not in any of the inquiry subdimensions, which suggests that preschool teachers can draw from their PCK to guide children through the inquiry process even when they lack the relevant CK. Further, the CK+PCK-group was significantly better than the CK-group in the content dimension and in the more complex inquiry subdimensions hypothesizing and interpreting but not in questioning, testing, and describing. These differences suggest that PCK is necessary for preschool teachers to conduct inquiry in a deeper and more meaningful manner and that the implementation of scientific inquiry activities provides a crucial framework in which the content of the learning activity can be explored.

• Dokumententyp: Dissertationen (Dissertation, LMU München)
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 370 Erziehung, Schul- und Bildungswesen
• Fakultäten: Fakultät für Psychologie und Pädagogik
• Sprache der Hochschulschrift: Englisch
• Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 15. März 2022
• 1. Bericht­erstatter:in: Neuhaus, Birgit