%0 Journal Article
%T Scientific Reasoning in Elementary School Children: Assessment of the Inquiry Cycle
%A Jessika Golle
%A Julia Schiefer
%A Kerstin Oschatz
%A Maike Tibus
%J Journal of Advanced Academics
%@ 2162-9536
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1932202X18825152
%X Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8- to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the scientific inquiry cycle (SIC). Such an understanding is essential for scientific reasoning as well as for inquiry-based learning approaches and, above all, for scientific practice. We developed and applied 15 items in a sample of 878 third- and fourth-grade students (n = 434, Grade 3; n = 435, Grade 4). As confirmed by item response theory (IRT) modeling, the items produced reliable scale scores. Furthermore, we explored the relations between childrenĄ¯s SIC performances, cognitive abilities, and epistemic beliefs. As expected, intelligence, text comprehension, experimentation strategies, and sophisticated epistemic beliefs were positively associated with childrenĄ¯s SIC performance, a finding that helps to establish initial evidence for the construct validity of the SIC test scores
%K science
%K inquiry
%K instrument development
%K elementary
%K cognitive
%K epistemic beliefs
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1932202X18825152