Teaching science process skills in kindergarten

As science education has moved away from the pedagogy of memorizing facts to the pedagogy of acting on facts by way of formulating questions, using science process skills, and making conclusions, early childhood science education also aims to equip children with necessary thinking and process skills. There is not much research which examines and explores in-class practices of teaching, learning, and performing science process skills from the perspectives of teachers. This study aimed to fill this gap, at least a little, and provide teachers with suggestions of how to further the development of science process skills in young children. The researcher chose to utilize a qualitative data collection method (i.e., interviews) and an interpretive data analysis method (i.e., content analysis) in order to gain in-depth information on teaching science process skills from 30 teachers from all over the city of Kutahya. Findings of this study show that all teachers believed that they taught science process skills and helped children develop those skills. However, the teachers' definitions, examples, and answers to further questions suggested that they had not truly internalized the meaning of the science process skills.