Back to basics: pre-service early childhood teachers’ challenges in questioning to elicit children’s ideas in science

Learners’ pre-existing ideas are central to the construction of new knowledge in science education. Teachers’ questions serve as a prevalent means of eliciting these ideas. However, posing appropriate questions to promote students’ clarification of meanings, juxtaposition of viewpoints and higher-order thinking presents significant challenges for both pre-service and in-service teachers. This study investigates the types of questions pre-service early childhood teachers propose for eliciting children’s ideas about science topics. Participants were 277 pre-service teachers at a Greek higher education institution who were asked to formulate elicitation questions about different science topics. A total of 2,000 questions were collected and analysed to assess their potential to engage children as active learners, their productivity and whether they were open-ended or closed. The results indicate that pre-service teachers prefer interrogative/factual, non-productive and closed-ended questions over speculative/student-centred, productive and open-ended questions, respectively. Furthermore, the preference for particular question types varies across different science topics, implying that the challenges participants face are content-dependent. These findings shed light on the issues that science education training programmes for pre-service early childhood teachers preparing to work with children aged 4 to 6, should emphasise to scaffold them throughout the complex and demanding process of developing effective questioning practices.