Inquiry in the kindergarten science: Helping kindergarten teachers to implement inquiry-based teaching

Twenty kindergarten in-service teachers participated in a 25hr professional development program (PDP) supporting the development of abilities for identifying and responding to students' in-class inquiry. Each teacher taught a science lesson at the beginning and at the end of the PDP. These were videotaped and analyzed in terms of the student inquiry the teachers responded to. Findings suggest that average student talk duration increased and students' leads were increasingly used to guide lesson flow. Teachers increased responses to students' reasoning and logic, offered more clarifications to students' ideas and reasoning, and decreased evaluations of students' ideas. However, teacher responses to knowledge claims increased and those to everyday experiences decreased.