María Marta Alarcón-Orozco

Critical thinking (CT) is increasingly recognized as a transversal competence within STEM education, yet it is often addressed implicitly in preservice teacher training. This study analyzes the development of critical thinking in 130 Preservice Early Childhood Education Teachers (PECETs) who, during the 2024–2025 academic year, participated in a training programme designed from a STEM perspective and grounded in scientific inquiry. A mixed-methods approach was used to examine the teaching unit elaborated by PECETs with a rubric that assessed stages of inquiry, as well as to analyze their final reports for evidence of connections between CT and STEM. The findings revealed strong scientific thinking but only superficial links to STEM and CT suggesting progress in participants’ scientific reasoning and analytical and reflective competence. However, evidence of explicit STEM integration and CT justification remained limited. These results confirm the formative potential of inquiry-based STEM education for supporting CT development in early childhood preservice teacher education, while highlighting the need for more explicit scaffolding of inquiry phases, structured reflection opportunities, and collaborative argumentation tasks to strengthen conceptual integration and deepen critical engagement with scientific evidence.

The influence of emotions on teaching –learning processes is a topic of increasing interest in science education research. This study explores the emotions experienced by 121 preservice early childhood teachers during a training program in inquiry‐based science education. Using a checklist of nine emotions (both positive and negative), participants indicated the emotions they experienced at three stages of the instruction: at the outset, after experiencing an inquiry cycle as science learners, and after designing an inquiry cycle as teacher trainees. Only five of the emotions (interest, concentration, confidence, enjoyment, and insecurity) were reported at all three stages, and closer analysis showed that their prevalence varied depending on the phase of the inquiry cycle and the role that students were in (i.e., science learners or teacher trainees). In both roles, insecurity was generally associated with the initial phases of inquiry (problem formulation, designing experiments, and choosing variables); enjoyment was more prevalent during the phases of realization of the experience in the science learner role and of data analysis in the teacher trainee role; and confidence was particularly associated with the drawing conclusions phase in both roles. These results suggest that in order to understand preservice early childhood teachers' emotions in relation to inquiry‐based science education, it is necessary to consider the different phases of inquiry, each of which may generate a different emotional response. When instructing preservice teachers in the use of inquiry tasks, their emotions are also likely to vary depending on whether they are engaging with the approach as science learners or teacher trainees.