STEM knowledge development in childhood

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

MINT: Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaften and Technik

Researcher: Dr. Peter Edelsbrunner

In elementary school science teaching, questions arise such as “are children equipped with the necessary cognitive skills to comprehend demanding learning materials?” In the project “Science Knowledge in Childhood: Structure, Development, and Cognitive Correlates”, this question is examined by relating children’s knowledge development to crucial cognitive skills.

The project is embedded in the Swiss longitudinal STEM Study (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), in which a large number of Swiss school pupils receive optimized science instruction, starting with basic physics in elementary school. For a subsample of these children, data on general reasoning skills and on more specific reasoning within scientific contexts (the understanding of experimental designs and of epistemological characteristics of science, e.g., Kuhn, 2010) are related to children’s knowledge development over the course of instruction.

As the development of conceptual science knowledge represents complex, idiosyncratic processes, the choice of an adequate statistical model is crucial in order to obtain a detailed depiction of children’s knowledge development (Schneider & Hardy, 2013). In the present project, mixture models are applied which explicitly acknowledge idiosyncracy but also systematicity in depicting knowledge development.