Promoting Pre School Students' Learning of Natural Sciences Using Scaffolding Strategies - A Reanalysis of Video Data

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Natural sciences have become more relevant in pre school education over the last years. There is empirically sound data demonstrating that pre school students have the cognitive requirements to understand scientific phenomena. The goal of science education at pre school level is to develop intermediate concepts which are compatible with the teaching at primary school level. For this development of concepts nursery school teachers are important, but until now there is a lack of information about how nursery school teachers should promote their students' development of concepts in detail. The two concepts sustained shared thinking and scaffolding show a lot of possible ways how nursery school teachers can promote their students' learning at pre school level in general. Therefore a transfer to learning sciences appears to be fruitful. This project intends to identify different scaffolding strategies used by nursery school teachers to promote scientific learning at pre school level. Furthermore the relation between the use of scaffolding strategies and the increase of knowledge of pre school students is investigated, also for students with advantageous and disadvantageous prerequisites for learning. For this reason video and knowledge test data of 26 pre school students is reanalysed. The videos show groups of four to seven pre school students and a nursery school teacher conducting scientific experiments on chemical and physical phenomena. The students' knowledge has been measured before and after the intervention of ten days via a test. The videos are reanalysed using a manual which is developed in the project. It is coded which scaffolding strategies the nursery school teachers use to promote students' learning during the experiments. The relation between the use of scaffolding strategies and the knowledge increase of the students is computed via regression analyses. To determine the students' learning prerequisites the nursery school teachers rated them regarding their cognitive abilities.