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Recent national focus on early childhood science education highlights the need for research on early science, particularly with children from low-income families, as science is the lowest performing school readiness domain in that population. Given this achievement gap, the Office of Head Start has emphasized the development of children's domain-general skills, such as approaches to learning, because they help children succeed in the classroom regardless of academic content area. Recent research suggests a unique relationship between early science and approaches to learning, in that approaches to learning predicts gains in science readiness more so than math or language readiness. This study further explored this relationship by examining the potential bidirectionality between science and approaches to learning.Results obtained from hierarchical linear modeling suggest a significant bidirectional relationship, such that residualized change approaches to learning across the school year predicted gains in science across the year, and residualized change in science across the year predicted gains in approaches to learning across the year. These results suggest that development of children's approaches to learning relates to gains science knowledge, and that gains in children's science knowledge relates to the positive development of approaches to learning across the school year. This study provides support for future research examining the potential of science interventions to serve as a context for developing approaches to learning skills that will in turn help children engage in quality science learning. Such research would leverage the bidirectional relationships between these two constructs and could be a step in the national attempt to narrow the science and school readiness achievement gaps.

Approaches to learning are a set of domain-general skills that encompass curiosity, persistence, planning, and engagement in group learning. These skills play a key role in preschoolers' learning and predict school readiness in math and language. Preschool science is a critical domain for early education and facilitates learning across domains. However, no studies to date have examined how approaches to learning affect science outcomes in preschoolers. This study addressed this gap in the literature by testing predictive associations between approaches to learning and gains in science, as well as, math, vocabulary, and listening comprehension, across the school year, in a sample of preschoolers from low-income families. Results indicated that approaches to learning significantly predicted gains in science, and trended towards predicting gains in math, but not vocabulary or listening comprehension. These findings highlighted the potential of approaches to learning to facilitate early science learning for children from low income families.