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CREST | Research
IES awards College researchers $4.8 million/5 years to create a new doctoral training program for educational scientists
CIRGE | Research
CIRGE has been busy: its 5-Years Out study drew wide attention and it has hosted three int'l workshops on PhD education...
Research
That Matters
Cuz Why? Engaging Young Children in Scientific Inquiry
Young children live and breathe science. Playing in the backyard, they stick their noses deep inside a flower, pick up an earthworm to study how it wriggles. They lie on the grass and stare at the sky, their heads full of questions. Why are some flowers smelly? How can worms move without legs? Why is the sky blue? How does a bird fly?
“I would argue that children really want to understand how the world works, and this starts very, very early,” says developmental psychologist Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl, whose research at the College of Education focuses on designing 
educational environments that support children to deeply explore scientific ideas.
“First, children tell you about their physical world, then, by ages three to four, their descriptions move into questions,” says the associate professor. “They ask ‘Why’ questions, then start offering some explanation. By the time they enter first grade, children are remarkably capable of explaining the world and developing theories about the way things work. “We too often forget the thread of young children’s interest in explaining the world they live in, and that’s the beginning form of science,” says Herrenkohl.
As a result, children’s natural curiosities can go uninvestigated. One potential explanation for this lies in beliefs about young children’s lack of ability for abstract reasoning.
“At one time it was common to believe that young children were solely concrete thinkers, unable to engage in the
abstract thinking required to develop explanations. Multiple lines of research now demonstrate that this is not the case,” says Herrenkohl.
Herrenkohl’s own research examines how intentional classroom environments can help children develop habits of higher-level, scientific thinking. In a scientist, those habits include experimenting, hypothesizing, connecting, collaborating, offering proof, sharing and challenging peer ideas, revising conclusions, defending ideas, capitalizing on mistakes. In a classroom of early learners, the habits may begin with a discussion of a project, and a teacher’s simple questions: “What happened?” “Then what?” “What do you think?” “How do you know?” These are questions the children will use to challenge one another as they learn to “talk science.”
A child’s fragmented version of science talk may not look like Isaac Newton’s, and teachers may have to listen closely to see sophisticated inquiry processes at 
work. “Cuz why?” may be a demand for proof. “Gross, like slime,” could be a careful observation, comparison, and analogy. Reasoning may go forward, backward or sideways. One little boy Herrenkohl worked with said he knew why a shape was called an octagon: “Because it has eight sides. An octagon has eight sides and an octopus has eight arms.”
In collaboration with other teachers and researchers, Herrenkohl followed that boy and his fellow second-graders at a public science/technology magnet school in New England. The school, preschool to sixth grade, had a rich racial, ethnic and socioeconomic mix — important because minorities, second language learners and girls are historically less successful at science.
The team of researchers and teachers used Complex Instruction, an approach that focuses on higher-order thinking skills, to engage second-graders in collaborative scientific learning with hands-on activities. One activity was balancing objects on a scale that allowed children to vary weight and distance from the scale’s fulcrum. Although children sometimes had difficulty verbalizing their understanding, they did come to recognize that both weight and distance mattered. As one young girl wrote in her science journal, “We learned in our grop thet it dose not have to be eqle to balice.” Another child told the teacher, “See cuz if you put it over here it’ll weigh more,” pointing to the end of the balance scale.
Teachers introduced students to subject matter, then brainstormed questions. At the start of a construction project, kids asked, “How does a structure know its own weight?” and “Why does a structure fall down?” In small groups, building structures with straws and tape, the children developed and tested ideas, then found out what others thought and why they thought it. Encouraged by teachers, they clarified and built on one another’s ideas, marshaling one another’s strengths in their teamwork. Teachers pushed inquiry with questions such as, “Why do you think that happened?” and encouraged children to make connections between their school science explorations and their outside-of-school activities.
Trying to understand the difference between dissolution and disappearance, one boy explained that the antacid that he dropped in water wasn’t gone — it was like a vitamin you swallowed that stayed in your body.
In “wrap-up,” children discussed their work with the entire class. The children articulated ideas and defended them against challenges. Group sense-making led to individual understanding.
When one child wrote, “I learned that…” her classmate rephrased it to “We all learned that…” The learning worked both ways.
The second-graders in Herrenkohl’s study went on to perform quite successfully in the science subtest of the first Massachusetts Assessment of Educational Progress Test, knowing science as a process, a way of thinking, an attitude of mind.
Such intensive teaching is a challenge for teachers. It requires time and energy at a time of increased curricular demands. “Elementary and preschool teachers are amazing human beings. We ask of them more than we ask of anyone else,” says Herrenkohl. “They have to know every subject, then translate what they know into opportunities for young children to learn and understand.”
Teachers in the early grades do much to shape children’s lifelong views of learning and knowing. The curiosity of budding young scientists can be supported, even fueled, when the response to a question about how worms move is, “Let’s watch some worms and find out!”
More information about Herrenkohl’s research can be found in:
Reddy, M., Jacobs, P., McCrohon, C. & Herrenkohl, L.R. (1998). Creating scientific communities in the elementary school: Perspectives from a teacher-researcher collaboration. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Herrenkohl, L. R., & Guerra, M. R. (1998). Participant structures, scientific discourse, and student engagement in fourth grade, Cognition and Instruction, 16, 433-475.
Palincsar, A. S., & Herrenkohl, L. R. (2002). Designing collaborative contexts. Theory Into Practice, 41, 26-32.
Herrenkohl, L.R. (2006). Intellectual Role-Taking: An Approach to Support Discussion in Heterogeneous Elementary Science Classes. Theory into Practice., 45, 47-54.
College of Education, University of Washington
Box 353600 Seattle, WA 98195-3600
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