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Does it Work?: Building Methods for Understanding Effects of Chandra Orrill - corrill@uga.edu The connection between teacher professional development and subsequent student achievement is not well understood. Yet, the most important factor that can be altered for improving student achievement in mathematics is teacher knowledge (e.g., Hill, Rowan, & Ball, 2005; Ma, 1999; National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, 1996). A number of frameworks have been put forward outlining the elements that professional development needs in order to help teachers learn more about the content they teach and how their students learn (e.g., Kilpatrick, Swafford, & Findell, 2001; Loucks-Horsley, Love, Stiles, Mundry, & Hewson, 2003; NPEAT, 2000). Despite this work, little is known about how the facilitator, teachers, and program elements that comprise a professional development system (Borko, 2004) interact with classroom instruction that is shaped by further interactions among teachers, students, and content as embedded in instructional materials (Cohen & Ball, 1999). To study this interaction, we will offer an existing professional development program (the NSF-funded InterMath program) to middle grades teachers in Atlanta Public Schools and will consider the following questions:
The context of our study will be the InterMath (http://intermath.coe.uga.edu) professional development course on Number Sense. This is a 50-hour professional development course aimed at developing teacher content knowledge in Number Sense by engaging the teachers in open-ended problems that are explored with technologies such as spreadsheets, Geometer’s SketchPad, and Graphing Calculator software. In the teachers’ classrooms, we will consider the teaching and learning of fractions, decimals, percents, and proportions. We will offer approximately four implementations of the InterMath course in a single school district and will use control groups in year 1 and year 2 of the data collection. All teachers who participate in the control groups will have the opportunity to participate in the InterMath course as treatment participants in subsequent offerings. We will collect a variety of data to document teacher learning and changes in practice. First, we will videotape the professional development experience and will collect written materials produced as the teachers complete their work. For each participant, these artifacts will include approximately 10 “write-ups” in which each teacher explains the processes used to solve a given problem as well as two lesson plans that incorporate InterMath principles in them. Second, we will use the Learning Mathematics for Teaching instrument developed at the University of Michigan to measure teacher knowledge in a pretest/posttest design not only to determine whether learning occurred, but also to identify latent groups defined by different response patterns to items on the LMT. Third, we will two sources of data on teachers' practices: (a) from all participating teachers, we will collect quizzes and test items the teachers are using with their students and (b) we will observe a subgroup of teachers from across the identified latent groups before taking the InterMath course, during the course, and after the course as they teach the content of interest in this study. This will allow us to better understand how the InterMath ideas are or are not being taken into the classroom. To document student achievement, we will collect data on students' performance on the state’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test as well as on Balanced Assessment items chosen specifically because they measure the content of interest. Products of the research effort will include methods for tracing effects of professional development from the professional development system to the classroom and data about teacher and student learning with particular attention to fractions content.
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