: Thinking like scientists: how to cultivate scientific thought in primary classrooms. Encouraging children to be curious, ask questions, and make observations supports their inquisitive young minds.

Ellie Caple and Rebekah Edwards are evidence advocates at Tudor Grange Research School

Children are born with a deep, innate desire to understand their world. Anyone who has interacted with small children will be familiar with endless ​‘why?’ questions! Primary science provides an excellent opportunity to tap into this natural curiosity and to encourage the ​‘why question’ stage of development and create a permanently inquisitive mind. We want children to retain their urge to question, challenge and explore – to ​‘think like scientists’

The EEF’s new Primary Science Guidance Report is an excellent resource that provides guidance to science leads, class teachers and school leaders in how we can best support inquisitive young minds. The second recommendation in Improving Primary Science encourages students to explain their thinking about scientific ideas, initially verbally but in time through writing too.

In Tudor Grange Academies Trust (TGAT) science lessons, thinking like a scientist is encouraged through a range of activities such as:

1. Debating whether a statement is true of false

2. Asking children to justify their choice of an odd-one-out

3) Discussing similarity and difference

4) Drawing on personal experience

However, thinking about new ideas requires significant cognitive effort and can be daunting. Children are often motivated by getting the ​‘right’ answer and it takes a shift in mindset to view the thinking process as the goal rather than an answer. Improving Primary Science spotlights the need for building a collaborative learning environment where children feel safe to explore new ideas. At TGAT, students are encouraged to think like scientists through paired (think, pair, share opportunities) or small group work tasks where they can develop part-formed ideas in a low-stakes supportive environment. Whiteboards or post-it notes can be highly effective methods to encourage suggestions or ideas to be expressed in written form. Their temporary nature makes them feel less threatening than committing an answer to paper in a book which will be reviewed by a teacher. What is written on a whiteboard or post-it note can be rubbed out or discarded as thinking develops and this encourages children to explore and change their minds.

Thinking about unfamiliar science concepts, like all learning, can be messy. At TGAT, students will refine their thinking multiple times as their understanding of a concept grows. Teachers can encourage this by providing opportunities in lessons for students to revisit an earlier prediction or explanation and amend or add to it after new learning has taken place.

For most young children, questioning, challenging and exploring – thinking like scientists – is part of natural development. And yet, as they get older, these thinking skills can become muted in the public forum of a classroom, where the perception may be that there is a ​‘right’ answer. By normalising questioning, debate and the need to sometimes change our mind, by creating a safe and collaborative environment, we nurture the scientific thinking which comes so naturally to younger children. And we create future analytical adults, who are open to new evidence and able to reshape their ideas – a generation who think like scientists.