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Institute
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.
The use of scaffolding to promote preschool children’s competencies of evidence-based reasoning
(2021)
Scientific reasoning encompasses individuals‘ evaluation of evidence with regard to a given hypothesis. In this study, we investigated whether preschool children are able to reason with empirical evidence in the science context of elasticity. N = 63 preschoolers were presented with tasks following the deductive reasoning paradigm and were asked to evaluate the relevance of given events (objects) with regard to a hypothesis. In a repeated measures experimental design with three groups, we tested whether different forms of scaffolding (adaptive prompts with/without modeling of advanced reasoning) would promote children’s reasoning compared to a control group without intervention. We found that adaptive prompts with modeling significantly improved children’s evaluation of irrelevant events in the posttest. Further, these children’s reasoning patterns scored significantly higher than those of the control group. Our results suggest that preschool children are able to reason with evidence if they are given adequate support. Specifically, the modeling of advanced reasoning functioned as a scaffold beyond the use of adaptive prompts in irrelevant event evaluations.