Scientific literacy serves as a common foundation and core objective of STEM education. While non-cognitive factors such as curiosity, interest, and identity are recognised as crucial for STEM engagement, research on collective relationships to cognitive factors remains insufficient. To investigate these associations, this study employed structural equation modelling (SEM) and multi-group path analysis on data of 5,939 fourth- and sixth-grade students in central China, examining the associative pathways between affective and cognitive factors within scientific literacy. SEM results indicated that: (1) Affective dimensions exhibited significant inter-associations, wherein curiosity showed a positive relation with scientific interest, which in turn was associated with science identity. (2) Among cognitive factors, content knowledge demonstrated a positive correlation with scientific reasoning, which was subsequently linked to scientific inquiry. (3) In specific pathways, affective factors exhibited direct associations with cognitive outcomes, predominantly linking curiosity to scientific inquiry and scientific identity to content knowledge. Furthermore, multi-group path analysis revealed that the overall model structure differed significantly in its associative patterns between the two grade levels. Specifically, the sixth-grade cohort exhibited significantly stronger associative coefficients along the pathways from curiosity to interest, and from knowledge to reasoning and inquiry.
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Zheng et al. (2026) studied this question.
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