Weizmann study: young children reason like scientists when asked "how" instead of "why"

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science announced on 1 September 2026 that children as young as seven can build surprisingly sophisticated scientific explanations, provided they are asked the right kind of question. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Learning Sciences, was led by Prof. Michal Haskel-Ittah of Weizmann's Department of Science Teaching with doctoral student Yael Shtechman and Prof. Marida Ergazaki of the University of Patras in Greece.

The team interviewed more than 50 pupils from second to sixth grade. Each child was asked to explain a biological phenomenon in their own words, for example how a pufferfish inflates or how a plant grows toward the light, and then to judge between several competing explanations offered by others. About 68 percent of the children produced mechanistic explanations, describing a chain of cause, internal process and result. The rest gave circular answers or teleological ones that point to a goal, such as saying the fish puffs up to scare predators, without explaining how it happens.

The wording of the question mattered. Asking how something works drew out step-by-step reasoning far more often than asking why, which tended to prompt answers about purpose. Gentle follow-ups such as asking how that would actually work helped many children expand an incomplete answer into a full mechanism. When choosing between explanations, the children consistently preferred mechanistic ones and judged them by their accuracy and explanatory power. No meaningful differences were found between boys and girls.

The children's biological facts were often wrong, but the logical structure of their thinking was already in place. The researchers argue that this resolves conflicting findings in earlier studies about when children start reasoning mechanistically, and that schools should give feedback on how pupils reason rather than rewarding only correct answers. An outside expert quoted by The Times of Israel welcomed the questioning strategy while noting that larger studies are needed.