In the current study, we provide a systematic understanding of how early childhood educators (N = 209) believe that they would respond to children's scientific questions. We compared 105 inservice preschool and early elementary grade teachers’ and 104 preservice teachers’ responses on an online survey consisting of 3 parts: (a) responses to children's scientific questions (b) personal epistemologies and (c) demographic information. Results are consistent with naturalistic classroom data demonstrating that inservice and preservice teachers are more likely to answer children's questions with explanations rather than other types of responses when responding to children's science questions. We also explored possible relations between teachers’ responses, demographic variables, and personal epistemologies. We discuss implications of these findings for how teachers’ responses to children's questions may send a message to children about how to construct and reason about knowledge in the world.

在当前的研究中，我们系统地了解了幼儿教育工作者 ( N = 209) 相信他们会回答孩子们的科学问题。我们比较了 105 名在职学前班和小学早期教师和 104 名在职教师的回答，该在线调查由 3 部分组成：(a) 对儿童科学问题的回答 (b) 个人认识论和 (c) 人口统计信息。结果与自然主义的课堂数据一致，表明在回答儿童科学问题时，在职和职前教师更有可能通过解释而不是其他类型的回答来回答儿童的问题。我们还探讨了教师的反应、人口统计变量和个人认识论之间可能存在的关系。我们讨论了这些发现对教师如何对儿童的反应的影响