Habits of mind refer to children’s habits of reasoning and practices of problem-solving in daily activities (Butler, 2020). Simoncini (2017) recognized STEM habits of mind as a shared STEM language that could help adults identify children’s STEM process skills during activities. STEM process skills were conceptualized as the ability children developed in STEM education (National Research Council, 2012). With the increasing attention on STEM in recent years, studies at home and abroad measured children’s acquisition of STEM process skills by using qualitative and quantitative tools to present the effect of STEM education in early childhood (e.g. Aladé et al., 2016; Malone et al., 2018; Sullivan & Bers, 2019; Wang, 2021). Some of the results indicated that preschool children’s cognition of STEM process skills can be increased under intervention (e.g. Aldermin & Kermani, 2017; Kazakoff et al., 2013; Miller, 2018; Tank et al., 2018), others found that the mastery degree of STEM process skills positively correlated with children’s age (Kanaki & Kalogiannakis, 2022; Sullivan & Bers, 2016). However, the majority of these studies were discipline-based, such as scientific process skills in science, programming in technology, engineering-related skills, and measuring skills in mathematics (Hasan et al., 2020; Hoisington & Winokur, 2015; Wan et al., 2021; Yücelyiğit & Toker, 2021). There is a lack of research on assessing kindergarten children’s STEM process skills from an integrative perspective. Especially in China, the relevant study remains at the initial stage, leading to a relatively insufficient understanding of teachers on observing and supporting children in STEM education. To address this gap, this study aims to develop and validate a children’s STEM habits of mind questionnaire for early childhood teachers to assess children’s STEM process skills.
Literature Review
Confronted with the pressures of school readiness and employment in the 21st century, it is critical for preschool learners to understand STEM (Buchter et al., 2017; McClure et al., 2017). STEM is an educational practice, which integrates science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into formal and informal learning contexts (Lantz, 2009). High-quality early childhood education programs should provide children with interdisciplinary STEM experience to actively engage them in the real-world questions identifying and problem-solving learning (Bybee, 2013; Early Childhood STEM Working Group, 2017). Moreover, some STEM studies only focused on separate disciplines (Hasan et al., 2020; Hoisington & Winokur, 2015). As the scarcity of prior studies on integrating the four disciplines of STEM in early childhood education, we adopt both integrated and discipline-based perspectives to review the relevant literature on children’s STEM education and STEM habits of mind.
Stem Habits Of Mind In Early Childhood
STEM education emphasizes the direct inquiry into real context (Murphy et al., 2019). Children are born with curiosity, which drives them to question and explore the world naturally (Piaget, 1976). In other words, they have the capacities and rights to initiate and lead learning, which is consistent with the requirement of STEM learning (Simoncini, 2017). According to Murphy et al. (2019), STEM education could not only supply early childhood children with academic discipline knowledge, but also empowers them with intra-disciplinary skills, such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. In kindergarten, children’s spontaneous constructive play, scientific experiments, and pretend play opens up possibilities for STEM learning (Hoisington & Winokur, 2015). They develop science process skills (Eshach & Fred, 2005), mathematical concepts (Watts et al., 2018), computational thinking (Sullivan & Bers, 2016), cognition (McClure et al., 2017), and literacy (Kewalramani et al., 2021) during inquiry-based STEM activities. These competencies children learned in STEM activities could be categorized as STEM process skills (National Research Council, 2012).
Compared to the STEM process skills, the STEM habits of mind also can be recognized as competence that children developed during STEM education (Lange et al., 2019). Costa and Kallick (2009) first discussed the habits of mind with young children’s learning. They considered habits of mind as learning dispositions when children are confronted with problems. After, Moore et al. (2018) combined the habits of mind and STEM education and suggested that children showed habits of mind in early engineering learning, including curiosity, creativity, persistence, collaboration, and communication. Likewise, Lippard et al. (2019) noted the importance of habits of mind in preschool children’s engineering thinking and acting process and summarized it as systems thinking, optimism, communication, collaboration, creativity, and ethical considerations.
Different from the opinion above which is limited to the engineering discipline, Simoncini (2017) studied early childhood STEM habits of mind from an integrated perspective. Although young children show capacities and great confidence to learn on their own, they need adults’ scaffold to guide and extend their STEM learning (Early Childhood STEM Working Group, 2017). However, due to the lack of a shared STEM language, teachers and parents are often unable to identify children’s STEM learning (Simoncini, 2017). To make STEM education more explicit, Simoncini (2017) put forward ten habits of mind, i.e., inquirers, observers, describers, encoders, decoders, engineers, pattern sniffers, experimenters, measurers, and predictors, and described key characteristics of each habits of mind with concise sentences. With these indicators, teachers could directly identify the STEM process skills that lie behind children’s behavior. Furthermore, Simoncini’s (2017) findings inspired us to design a measurement scale, aimed to assess early childhood children’s STEM process skills from an integrated perspective.
Measuring The Effect Of Stem Education In Early Childhood
There is a need to evaluate the effect of STEM education so that educators could better promote children’s development with concrete data (Wan et al., 2021). Reviewing the prior studies, the majority of them assessed the students at K-12 and tertiary levels (Gao et al., 2020), while only a limited number of them focused on the early years (Yang et al., 2021; Yücelyiğit & Toker, 2021). It is worth noting that most of the existing studies related to the effect of STEM education on preschool children were discipline-based and focused on measuring the acquisition of specific STEM process skills (Wan et al., 2021; Yücelyiğit & Toker, 2021). According to the research content, Wan et al. (2021) broadly divided the literature into four categories, i.e., programming robots, traditional engineering design, digital game, and comprehensive approach.
Robotic projects have been increasingly utilized in early childhood learning in recent years (Bers, 2008; Kewalramani et al., 2021). Kazakoff et al. (2013) assessed 27 kindergarten children’s sequencing skills using a picture-story sequencing task before and after the programming and robotics learning intervention and compared the consequence with a control group. After that, Sullivan and Bers (2018) continued to intervene in children’s programming and robotics learning and conduct similar studies. They used Robot Parts and Solve-its tools to investigate whether older children were more capable to learn complex programming (Sullivan & Bers, 2016), employed Solve-its tool, and found that the intervention curriculum promoted children’s sequencing skills and wait for clap command (Sullivan & Bers, 2018), utilized the tool of Engineering is Elementary Attitudes Assessment to prove that the intervention curriculum could significantly increase girls desire to be an engineer and boy’s understanding about what engineers do (Sullivan & Bers, 2019).
In terms of the impact of engineering on young children, Tank et al. (2018) designed an engineering-based unit to guide 32 American kindergarten children to solve the problem of transporting wet and dry rocks. They used video to record children’s performance and analyze their learning behaviors, perceived that children’s engineering learning follow an iterative process and the intervention improved children’s career aspiration of engineers. Moreover, Malone et al. (2018) implemented an i-STEAM curriculum unit to examine its influence on early childhood children’s understanding of engineering and technology. The Student Conceptual Assessments What is Engineering? and What is Technology? have been used to collect data from 200 participants and reported an average 55% increase in the understanding of engineering and 36% increase in the understanding of technology.
Scholars believed that young children could develop their cognition of science and mathematics while playing STEM games on laptops and tablets. For instance, Aladé et al. (2016) designed research to evaluate the effect of digital measuring games on preschool children’s measuring skills. Schroeder and Kirkorian (2016) used two digital games to teach young children about numerical, recognition and growth and assessed their achievements before and after the intervention. Miller (2018) implemented a 10-day digital numerical learning workshop and emphasized 4–5 years old children’s development on collaboration and engagement. In addition, Papadakis et al. (2018) conducted a study that contained 365 children from 21 kindergartens in Greece to measure the impact of laptop and tablet digital games on their comprehension of numbers. Recently, Kanaki and Kalogiannakis (2022) innovated a computer programming software as an assessment tool to measure the correlation between computational thinking and children’s age.
In addition to the studies mentioned above, individual researchers explored the effect of STEM education in early childhood from an integrative perspective. Aldermir and Kermani (2017) drew upon three science-centered units that contained technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts to intervene in kindergarten children’s learning in 10 weeks. A mixed-method (e.g., Test of Early Mathematics Ability-Third Edition [TEMA-3], video recording, interviews, and documents) has been used to collect and analyze data during this research. The result showed that children demonstrated significant improvement in all three disciplines. Another study regarded teachers as estimators who record children’s STEM performance by words (Milford & Tippett, 2015). They developed a Classroom Observation Protocol (COP) scale intended to capture children’s STEM behaviors from questioning, exploring and observing, developing skills and processes, communication, and playing so that teachers could envision and adjust their STEM teaching practice.
When it comes to China, which runs the world’s largest early childhood education system (Yang et al., 2022), research on the effect of STEM education in early childhood is limited to the discipline-based view. Zhu (2020) and Qin (2020) referred Test of Early Mathematics Ability-Third Edition (TEMA-3) and New Jersey Test of Reasoning Skills as instruments respectively to examine the impact of STEM education on preschool children’s numerical skills and critical thinking. Yang et al. (2021) developed a scale called STSS to assess early childhood teachers’ self-efficacy in STEM teaching. The STSS was divided into two dimensions, including Pedagogy Self-efficacy and Content Self-efficacy. The scale has been shown valid and reliable in 418 pre- and in-service preschool teachers in China. Another two studies employed the action research method to investigate whether STEM education influences young children’s deeper learning (Zhao, 2020) and science process skills (Wang, 2021). They mainly used qualitative research methods to collect and analyze data, such as video recording, interviews, and documents. Likewise, Gong (2020) was also concerned about the effect of STEM education on kindergarten children’s specific competence. She designed 10 STEM activities and used a scale to test children’s collaboration before and after the intervention. However, the scale in her study ignored the reliability and validity analysis. To date, there is a lack of studies in China assessing the effect of STEM education on kindergarten children from an integrative perspective. To address this gap, a scale that could directly reflect children’s STEM process skills for teachers to plan and adjust teaching practices and for researchers to evaluate the impact of STEM education needs to be developed.
Research Objectives And Questions
Accordingly, this study aimed to develop a scale that could assess kindergarten children’s STEM process skills so as to explore the effect on STEM education in early childhood settings from an integrative perspective. The present study investigated preschool children’s STEM process skills in China using a newly developed scale. We firstly collected data with the scale in kindergarten, and then validated this scale using factor analysis. We also examined the correlation between STEM process skills and children’s age to verify the criterion validity of the scale. The following questions guided this study:
RQ1: Is the Children’s STEM Habits of Mind Questionnaire (CSHMQ) valid and reliable for measuring young children’s STEM process skills?
RQ2: How do children’s STEM process skills relate to their age?