Longitudinal Design to Measure Effects of MSP Professional Development in Improving Instruction in Mathematics and Science Education

For the MSP program and NSF, our longitudinal research study offers two unique study design components that will be transferable to many Partnership projects. We will show: 1) how professional development programs and activities in multiple sites can be evaluated using a common set of research-based measures of quality, and 2) how survey methodology can be used to evaluate the effects of professional development in improving instruction in math and science, with change measured by improved alignment of instruction with content standards and assessments.

Our empirical study is designed on our recent work. Members of our team are leaders in two advanced research methods for collecting data on instructional practices and content taught and in measuring the alignment of instruction with standards and assessments (through the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum which were developed with support from NSF).

Second, members of our research team have substantial expertise in developing reliable, objective methods of evaluating the quality of professional development (through a recent national study of mathematics and science professional development supported by US Department of Education).

Our specific challenge is to apply and adapt our existing models for evaluating instruction and professional development to the need of MSP Goal 3 to measure the effects of the broad range of MSP-supported activities aimed toward increasing the quality of teaching in K-12 mathematics and science and raising the achievement of students in MSP sites.