Professional development for language support in science classrooms: Evaluating effects for elementary school teachers

We investigate the effectiveness of professional development (PD) aimed at promoting teachers' language-support skills in elementary school science instruction. In a 2-year quasi-experimental field trial study with 32 teachers in Germany, an intervention group (IG) and a control group (CG) received PD for teaching selected science topics; the IG additionally received PD for language support. Strong treatment effects emerged on teachers' language-support skills and, to a lesser extent, on language support activities in classroom teaching. All teachers gained pedagogical content knowledge and self efficacy for teaching elementary school science, thus pointing to the effectiveness of the PD. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).