Israeli Study Finds 68% of Young Children Innately Reason Like Scientists When Asked ‘How,’ Not ‘Why’

When prompted with “how” questions that encourage step-by-step reasoning, 68 percent of children as young as second grade were able to devise plausible solutions to surprisingly sophisticated science questions, Israeli and Greek researchers have found. The peer-reviewed research, led by Prof. Michal Haskel-Ittah of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Science Teaching Department, PhD student Yael Shtechman, and Prof. Marida Ergazaki of the University of Patras in Greece, showed that seven-year-olds could come up with detailed scientific explanations for biological phenomena if they were asked questions that fostered thinking about sequential physical processes. In contrast, traditional “why” questions often led children to focus on something’s function rather than developing deeper analytical thinking.

For example, when asked “how” a blowfish inflates, 68 percent of the study’s 50 children in second through sixth grade explained the process using a logical chain of cause, process, and effect. When they were asked “why” a blowfish inflates, the children offered simpler answers, such as to keep predators away. A majority of the children, including second graders, could produce explanations of the underlying factors and relationships behind biological phenomena, Haskel-Ittah said. “They didn’t always have the biological facts right, but the structure of their mechanistic thinking was there.”

By shifting the focus to how things work, the study, published in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, can offer a teaching strategy to help students improve their cause-and-effect thinking. “If kids are only praised for getting the answer right, they’ll learn to repeat what they’ve memorized,” Haskel-Ittah added. Drawing attention to how children arrived at an answer, even when it is not scientifically accurate, encourages good thinking processes, she said. (TOI/VFI News)

“For the LORD gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” – Proverbs 2:6