Exploring potential cognitive foundations of scientific literacy in preschoolers: Causal reasoning and executive function

Abstract Despite increasing emphasis in the United States on promoting student engagement and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, the origins of scientific literacy remain poorly understood. We begin to address this limitation by considering the potential contributions of two distinct domain-general skills to early scientific literacy. Given their relevance to making predictions and evaluating evidence, we consider the degree to which causal reasoning skills relate to scientific literacy (as measured by an adaptive standardized test specifically designed for preschoolers). We also consider executive function (EF) as a potentially more fundamental contributor. While previous research has demonstrated that EF is predictive of achievement in other core academic domains like reading and math, its relationship to scientific literacy, particularly in early childhood, has received little attention. To examine how causal reasoning and EF together potentially relate to the development of scientific literacy in young children, we recruited 125 3-year-olds to complete three causal reasoning tasks, three EF tasks, and the aforementioned measure of scientific literacy. Results from a series of hierarchical regressions revealed that EF, and one measure of causal reasoning (causal inferencing) were related to scientific literacy, even after controlling for age, ethnicity, maternal education, and vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, causal inferencing ability was a significant partial mediator between EF and scientific literacy. Although additional research will be required to further specify the nature of these relationships, the current work suggests that EF has the potential to support scientific literacy, perhaps in part, by scaffolding causal reasoning skills.