Chapter 16 presents information on how EC professionals observe, assess and document science learning. EC professionals use evidence to determine what children know and understand, and base this on a process of observation (how children explore and interact within their environment), anecdotal note-taking, journal entries, checklists and folios of children’s work. The chapter describes strategies associated with the assessment of learning in science as outlined in the EYLF and the Australian Curriculum: Science. The information in this chapter is supported by case studies of EC professional practice.

Educators/teachers are required to determine what children know and understand so that they can effectively enhance children’s learning opportunities. Evidence of learning is usually obtained through a process of observation, anecdotal note-taking, journal entries, checklists and folios of children’s work. However, this data needs to be analysed by considering the full picture – who the child was playing with, what they were doing, what science underpinned the play activities and the children’s dispositions at the time. In early childhood centres, this understanding of a child’s learning is often determined through a democratic process (Dahlberg & Moss, 2008) that involves the collaboration of educators/teachers. This chapter describes and provides examples of children’s learning in science with reference to the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (DEEWR, 2009a) and the Australian Curriculum: Science (ACARA, 2015).

Young children’s questions are ubiquitous around the world, yet question–asking and –answering are cultural practices; we must investigate cultural variation in how these practices develop rather than assume that certain practices are universal. We question an assumption in the literature that children from families of lower income or schooling have “deficits” in cognitive development. In this chapter, we critique deficit approaches and review cross–cultural studies of children’s questions within the frame of avoiding deficit assumptions. We then present findings regarding children’s questions from two studies of family conversation in different communities: a diary study of children’s spontaneous conversations about nature, and a study of parent–child conversations in a sink–and–float prediction task. In both studies, contrary to deficit ideas, we found evidence that children whose parents have lower levels of schooling showed evidence of more science–related reasoning in their questions than did those from the higher schooling group – children in the “basic schooling” group asked more explanation-seeking (not fact–seeking) questions in one study, and more conceptual (not procedural) questions in the other. Asking questions may be a cultural universal, yet our findings reveal diversity and raise questions about normativity, as well as how to define sophisticated reasoning.