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Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8-to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the scientific inquiry cycle (SIC). Such an understanding is essential for scientific reasoning as well as for inquiry-based learning approaches and, above all, for scientific practice. We developed and applied 15 items in a sample of 878 third-and fourth-grade students (n = 434, Grade 3; n = 435, Grade 4). As confirmed by item response theory (IRT) modeling, the items produced reliable scale scores. Furthermore, we explored the relations between children's SIC performances, cognitive abilities, and epistemic beliefs. As expected, intelligence, text comprehension, experimentation strategies, and sophisticated epistemic beliefs were positively associated with children's SIC performance, a finding that helps to establish initial evidence for the construct validity of the SIC test scores.

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Background. Further developing students' thinking about knowledge and knowing in science (epistemic beliefs) is considered a normative goal of science education in many countries around the world, even for elementary-school-aged children.Aims. The goal of the present study was to introduce and evaluate a new intervention in science education aimed at developing children's epistemic beliefs, epistemic curiosity, and investigative interests. The intervention included an inquiry-based learning approach as well as reflections on epistemic issues because these methods are currently seen as most promising for fostering students' epistemic beliefs.Sample. Data were collected from 65 elementary school children in Grades 3 and 4 (58.46% boys, age: M = 8.73, SD = 0.60) who participated in a voluntary extracurricular STEM enrichment programme in south-west Germany.Methods. We investigated the effectiveness of the intervention by applying a randomized block design with a treated control group and repeated measures. The effectiveness of the intervention was analysed via multiple linear regression analyses.Results. The results indicated that the children assigned to the intervention developed more sophisticated epistemic beliefs and a higher level of epistemic curiosity than the children assigned to the control condition. No intervention effects were found on investigative interests. Conclusions.The results provide initial evidence for the effectiveness of the intervention and demonstrate that it is possible to improve epistemic beliefs among elementary school children in Grades 3 and 4. The study provides a starting point for understanding how young children develop epistemic beliefs.Promoting student achievement and competencies in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is a cornerstone of current educational research and practice (OECD, 2016). Besides obtaining knowledge in these disciplines, it is also relevant for students to understand how such knowledge is generated. The respective key questions are as follows: Is our knowledge certain, or does it change over time? Do allThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

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We present the TüEyeQ data set - to the best of our knowledge - the most comprehensive data set generated on a culture fair intelligence test (CFT 20-R), i.e., an IQ Test, consisting of 56 single tasks, taken by 315 individuals aged between 18 and 30 years. In addition to socio-demographic and educational information, the data set also includes the eye movements of the individuals while taking the IQ test. Along with distributional information we also highlight the potential for predictive analysis on the TüEyeQ data set and report the most important covariates for predicting the performance of a participant on a given task along with their influence on the prediction.