When prompted with “how” questions that encourage step-by-step reasoning, 68 percent of children as young as second grade were able to devise plausible solutions to surprisingly sophisticated science questions, according to Israeli and Greek researchers.

The peer-reviewed research, led by Prof. Michal Haskel-Ittah of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Science Teaching Department, PhD student Yael Shtechman, and Prof. Marida Ergazaki of the University of Patras in Greece, showed that seven-year-olds could come up with detailed scientific explanations for biological phenomena if they were asked questions that fostered thinking about sequential physical processes.

In contrast, traditional “why” questions often led children to focus on something’s function rather than developing deeper analytical thinking.

For example, when asked “how” a blowfish inflates, 68 percent of the study’s 50 children in second through sixth grade explained the process using a logical chain of cause, process, and effect. When they were asked “why” a blowfish inflates, the children offered simpler answers, such as to keep predators away.

“A majority of children in our study could produce explanations that highlight the underlying factors and relationships of biological phenomena, and this included second graders,” Haskel-Ittah told The Times of Israel in a Zoom call. “They didn’t always have the biological facts right, but the structure of their mechanistic thinking was there.”

By shifting the focus to how things work, the study, published in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, can offer a teaching strategy to help students improve their cause-and-effect thinking.

“If kids are only praised for getting the answer right, they’ll learn to repeat what they’ve memorized,” Haskel-Ittah added. “But if we also highlight how they arrived at that answer – even when it’s not scientifically accurate – we’re encouraging good thinking processes.”

Learning to answer with mechanistic explanations

Haskel-Ittah researches “not only science but also the philosophy of science,” she said. “And in the philosophy of science, when people talk about mechanisms in biology, they talk about ‘how’ questions.”

She explained that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, scientists began investigating the way children explain biological phenomena.

Answers that establish the link between cause and effect, and explore........

© The Times of Israel