Training the preschool scientist-in-waiting

Recently, Education Week highlighted the growing national interest in preschool science education (Viadero, 2010, January 20). The story leaves the impression that educating preschoolers in science is poised to become a national movement. Science education for preschoolers is supported in policy by a recent National Research Council (2007) report advocating preschool science instruction, backed economically by National Science Foundation and Department of Education funds for creating programs and outcome assessments, and guided intellectually by new theoretical insights about the nature of knowledge and young children's ability to acquire it. As early childhood programs are more and more being seen as vital to general social and educational reform, early science education is a potential key component. But are science education programs for preschoolers a good thing for the children and for science education in general? We ask this question as interested parties with backgrounds in the development of scientific reasoning as a developmental psychologist (EA) and in scientific understanding as a physicist and science educator (AJ). Our question is posed with specific reference to this new book by Gelman, Brenneman, Macdonald, and Román. The book offers a good springboard for the discussion as it presents a preschool science curriculum which (a) conforms to the kind of science education reform advocated by the NRC, (b) is supported by NSF and DOE funding, and (c) was developed by a team led by Rochel Gelman, a leading researcher and theorist in articulating the new theoretical view of the child on which the curriculum is based. The curriculum presented in the book has entered the broader culture as the teaching approach behind Sid the Science Kid (http://pbskids.org/sid/index. html), a popular PBS children's show co-produced by the Jim Henson Company. In a nutshell, the Preschool Pathways to Science (PrePS) curriculum holds that children have a good deal of general knowledge of specific intellectual domains but limited detailed knowledge of those domains. For example, although they readily distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, they may not understand what distinguishes them inside and out. Children's knowledge is leveraged by a PrePS teacher who guides the children through a socially based scientific inquiry process that fills out their domain knowledge and promotes skills relevant to the “scientist-in-waiting.” The term scientist-in-waiting expresses the recognition that pre-