Early Science Instruction and Academic Language Development Can Go Hand in Hand. The Promising Effects of a Low-Intensity Teacher-Focused Intervention

A combined approach to strengthen children’s scientific thinking: direct instruction on scientific reasoning and training of teacher’s verbal support

“…Additional improvement on domain-specific knowledge as acquired during the inquiry-based lesson series was also expected. Given the focus on the role of language in the verbal support condition, we expected larger gains on children's scientific reasoning and on their vocabulary (Henrichs & Leseman, 2014) compared to baseline condition. We expected the combined condition to show gains on all domains, as they are all addressed, and explored whether the combination would have a catalyst effect.…”

“…It has been shown that teachers can be effectively trained to apply these verbal scaffolding techniques and that, as a result, children's cooperation and understanding improves (Gillies, 2004). In addition, a teacher training on language promoting strategies might improve children's use of academic vocabulary (Henrichs & Leseman, 2014). However, it is yet unknown what children's learning gains with respect to the components of scientific reasoning and domain-specific knowledge is.…”

Professional Development and Its Impact on Children in Early Childhood Education and Care: A Meta-Analysis Based on European Studies

“…in relation to the Head Start program, but has also recently started to appear more systematically in Europe, for example in the Netherlands (e.g. Henrichs and Leseman, 2014).…”

“…We conduct a metaanalysis in which we initially include nine European studies on PD based on data from Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and Wales. The studies have different focus points despite all being concerned with child outcomes: Literacy, reading or language (Ecalle et al, 2015;Cviko et al, 2014 andHenrichs andLeseman, 2014), matematics (Gasteiger, 2014), or behavior and self-regulation (Hutchings et al, 2013;Jensen et al, 2013;Jensen et al, 2015;Perels et al, 2009 andRönnau-Böse et al, 2009). Thus, after restricting the studies of interest to be concerned with PD effects on child outcomes, there is a lot of variation in the actual outcomes investigated.…”

“…The Netherlands contribute with two studies (Cviko et al, 2014 andHenrichs andLeseman, 2014). Both studies are concerned with implementing more technology/science-rich learning activities for improving early language and literacy skills, and they both contain RCTs.…”