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CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION, AND PEDAGOGY article

Front. Educ.

Sec. STEM Education

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1574267

Recognising patterns of authentic inquiry-based approach to foster children scientifically reasoning process

Provisionally accepted
Caterina  BembichCaterina Bembich*Valentina  BolognaValentina Bologna
  • University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

The objectives of the ONU Agenda 2030 and the actions outlined in 2020 in the European agenda for skills underline the importance of bringing students closer to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects and consequently promote scientific education to accompany schools in the ecological and cultural transition. The global and European recognition of the importance of developing learning paths that immediately introduce children to scientific disciplines raises the need to think about learning environments and teaching paths that effectively promote the development of scientific thinking. The approach to STEM disciplines should be interdisciplinary and develop disciplinary and transversal skills, such as creativity, critical thinking, reasoning, and social, economic and environmental skills. The Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) is an example of an authentic inquiry approach, which promotes and fosters students' scientific abilities with active learning settings and activities. In this study, we focus on an example of how to develop children's scientific thinking using the ISLE approach. From a cognitive and non-cognitive point of view, we recognise the main features of the activated process in the learning sequences and identify patterns in their physical "babbling" reasoning, which is sustained by the teacher's scaffolding.

Keywords: reasoning, Authentic inquiry, scaffolding, stem, Physics

Received: 10 Feb 2025; Accepted: 05 Sep 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Bembich and Bologna. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Caterina Bembich, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy

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