Young chefs in the classroom: promoting scientific process skills and healthy eating habits through an inquiry-based cooking project

Following recipes, adding ingredients, creating something unique, and seeing the finished products are the cooking processes that children can get actively involved with. This paper presents a quantitative study exploring the effectiveness of an inquiry-based cooking project to improve children's scientific process skills and health eating habits. This research was conducted with 67 experimental and 58 control group students for nine months in South Korea. Based on the t-test results, significant improvements were found in children's scientific process skills: specifically, prediction, observation, classification, measurement, and discussion, as well as healthy eating habits. These results confirm that the cooking projects reinforce the academic experiences of children, helping them to develop scientific processing skills, and providing children with the opportunity for the joy of food preparation and cooking, and experiencing different foods and tastes, and promoting healthy eating habits. The critical role of the teacher in this study is being addressed to provide a scientifically and nutritionally purposeful classroom environment.