ESTELL Project

Effective Science Teaching for English Language Learners Project

Effective Science Teaching for English Language Learners: A Pre-Service Teacher Professional Development Research Project is funded by the National Science Foundation K-12 Discovery Research Program. The ESTELL project focuses on improving the science teaching and learning of K-6 linguistic minority students who are currently underserved in K-6 education through improving the pre-service education of elementary school teachers. ESTELL involves a collaboration between researchers and science teacher educators at the University of California Santa Cruz, San Diego State University, San Francisco State University and San Jose State University.

The goal of this project is to design, implement and evaluate a comprehensive, integrated model of pre-service elementary science teacher education by adapting a model of linguistically and culturally responsive ESTELL pedagogy that prior research has demonstrated significantly improves the achievement of English Language Learners. ESTELL is based on two bodies of prior work produced by researchers in the USDOE funded Center for Research on Education Diversity and Excellence (CREDE) project and the NSF funded Language Acquisition through Science Education in Rural Schools (LASERS) project.

Partner School Logos


NSF Logo

This project is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant #0822402. Any opinions, findings, conclusions and/or recommendations expressed herein are those of the principal investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.