Designing an interview protocol for identifying young children reasoning about variation within populations

Abstract

This paper reports on the design of an interview protocol that aims at identifying young children’s reasoning about the idea of variation within animal populations. More specifically, the protocol is meant to provide us with the opportunity to explore (a) whether 5-6 years-old children consider the members of a population as not identical to each other but possibly different in their external body traits, and (b) whether they can mobilize this idea of variation in the context of a problem-situation. We will discuss the design of the protocol, as well as some preliminary results of its small-scale implementation.