Many changes in K-12 education have created an increased and critical need for effective professional development for teachers. These changes include new standards; new curriculum and assessments; changes in student demographics; advances in classroom technology; and a growing shortage of qualified teachers. To address this need, many educational organizations are turning to web-based, online professional development, which can provide teachers with flexible scheduling and access to resources, mentors, and peers that would not be available otherwise.
A significant body of research enables us to define principles of effective professional development in face-to-face settings, and some research is available showing that online courses can be effective at the college and high school levels. However, very little research is available about the effectiveness of online professional development in which the goals are to impact both the content knowledge and the classroom practices of K-12 teachers. The proposed project will begin to establish a solid research base about online professional development by addressing three major questions, which fall under ROLE Program Quadrant III, Research on STEM Learning in Education Settings:
1. What is the comparative impact on teachers' content knowledge and instructional practices of alternative models of online professional development, face-to-face models, and hybrid models that combine the two? 2. How do the types of interactions among participants and between participants and workshop leaders differ across different online professional development models, and are these differences related to participants' satisfaction, knowledge acquisition, and changes in practice? 3. What are the factors that maximize the impact of online professional development on teachers' content knowledge and instructional practices?
To address these questions, the project will develop and implement a series of contrastive professional development workshops, including several online models, hybrid models that integrate some face-to-face meetings into the context of online workshops, and a more traditional onsite workshop model. The workshops will focus on topics selected from the middle school mathematics curriculum, and seek to both deepen participants' understanding of the mathematics and enhance their approaches to teaching this content. Within each content area, the goals, learning activities, teaching approach, and time requirements for participants will be held as constant as possible across workshop models. Multiple measures, including assessments of participants' content knowledge within the context of teaching tasks, participant surveys and interviews, analyses of lesson plans and student work, classroom observations, student surveys, and discourse analyses will be employed to address the three main research questions.
The results will inform educational policy makers, school and district administrators, professional development providers, faculty in teacher preparation programs, and teachers, as well as the research community.
