ABSTRACT
Children and scientists have many traits in common. Both strive to know as much as possible. Both are eager to acquire new strategies for learning. Both are perennially fascinated by how things work. The comparison can be drawn even more closely. To learn about their worlds, both children and scientists formulate hypotheses, perform experiements, analyze data, and draw conclusions. This “child-as-scientist” metaphor has been advanced previously by Inhelder and Piaget (1958) to describe the reasoning of adolescents. The purpose of the present paper is to describe some of the developments occurring between the ages of 3 and 5 years that make scientific reasoning possible.
