![]() ![]() ![]() Scientific thinking in children, which is understood as “the application of the methods or principles of scientific inquiry to reasoning or problem-solving situations” ( Zimmerman, 2007), has been primarily studied with respect to experimentation skills. Thus, the present results indicate that observation skills require not only domain-specific knowledge but also domain-general scientific reasoning abilities. In a mediation analysis, we found a significant indirect effect of language via these two predictors. Both scientific reasoning and domain-specific knowledge proved to be significant predictors of observation competency, explaining 35% of the variance. We tested relations between observation competency, domain-general scientific reasoning, domain-specific knowledge, and language abilities of 75 children (age 4 9 to 6 7). The present study investigates the relations of both domain-general scientific thinking and domain-specific knowledge in biology with observation competency in grade K children. We argue that observation competency shares the domain-general ability to differentiate hypotheses from evidence with other scientific methods. Previous research has shown that the quality of observations depends on specific knowledge in the domain. Observation is defined as an independent scientific method that includes not only the description of what is observed, but also all phases of the scientific inquiry, such as questioning, hypothesizing, testing, and interpreting. However, there are more scientific methods than just experimentation. Research on the development of scientific reasoning has put the main focus on children’s experimentation skills, in particular on the control-of-variables strategy. 2Department of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Institute for Developmental and Educational Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany.1Biology Education, Faculty of Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany. Janina Klemm 1, Pamela Flores 1*, Beate Sodian 2 and Birgit J. ![]()
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