Scientific Reasoning in Biology – the Impact of Domain-General and Domain-Specific Concepts on Children’s Observation Competency

Research on the development of scientific reasoning has put the main focus on children’s experimentation skills, in particular on the control-of-variables strategy. However, there are more scientific methods than just experimentation. Observation is a scientific method which is especially relevant for inquiry in biology, but also an important prerequisite for other methods. Previous research has shown that the quality of observations depends on...