| Summary: | Abstract
Little attention has been given to how young children reason about scientific concepts,
current research indicates that children from around 3-years-old to 8-years-old reason about
natural objects in a teleological manner: the belief that an entity or object has a specific
purpose. However, previous studies have elicited children’s ideas through possible leading
methods, for example, by asking “what is X for?”. A repeated-measures design was used to
investigate the hypothesis that question wording influences children’s (aged 4- and 5-years-
old) responses, with a leading treatment, what is X for?, resulting in more teleological
responses and an open treatment, why is there X?, producing more scientific answers.
McNemar’s test revealed that question wording had a significant effect (p. < .016, n = 24),
with the leading treatment resulting in only teleological responses and the open treatment
providing both teleological and scientific answers. The implications of this result suggest that
future research into children’s scientific reasoning must utilise open questions, which do not
lead participants, and that educators need to ensure they do not question children with
teleologically leading questions.
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