Preschool Teachers’ Support in Science and Engineering Education in the context of building blocks (PFKiNaT)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Miriam Leuchter
• Subject Area: General and Domain-Specific Teaching and Learning
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 446745359

We aim at including studying early childhood teachers’ professional competencies in early science and engineering education in the context of building blocks. We could show in the BauSpiel project that even a simple curriculum material with simple verbal and material support used by experimenters encourages pre-school children to learn about statics. In international research, playing with building blocks is increasingly seen as an excellent pre-school learning opportunity that allows for children to build up skills in the natural sciences and engineering in terms of both content and processes knowledge (Akman & Güçhan Özgül, 2015; Bonawitz et al., 2011; George, Göksun, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2019; Verdine, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, & Newcombe, 2014). However, early childhood teachers hardly show sufficient professional competencies to introduce children to scientific content and process knowledge in an age-appropriate way (Piasta, Pelatti, & Miller, 2014; Roth, 2014; van Aalderen-Smeets & Walma van der Molen, 2015). Furthermore, the use of scaffolds - the cognitive component of process quality - differs greatly between early childhood teachers (Pianta, Mashburn, Downer, Hamre, & Justice, 2008). This could be related to variations in pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and subject-specific content knowledge (CK). However, early childhood teachers need PCK and CK in order to successfully use a curriculum material and make it fruitful for student learning (Granger, Bevis, Southerland, Saka, & Ke, 2018).Therefore, this study will examine whether and to what extent early childhood teachers’ professional competencies (beliefs, PCK, CK, performance) can be detected in the context of building blocks. Building blocks can be understood as a learning opportunity in science and engineering per se not very complex, which, however, offers highly complex potential in terms of learning and teaching. In the envisaged project, three questions are to be examined. A) What professional competencies do early childhood teachers have in the context of building blocks? B) Can the development of early childhood teachers’ professional competencies (beliefs, PCK, CK, performance) be stimulated through the implementation of the low-threshold learning-teaching opportunity from the BauSpiel project? C) Do early childhood teachers’ professional competencies lead to an increase in learning for the children in terms of content and process knowledge?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants