Efforts to broaden the reach of college instructor professional development will be more successful if the design of professional development services is informed by good evaluation evidence about whether and how it is working. While improving student learning is the ultimate goal of college level instructor professional development, measuring student outcomes directly is difficult and expensive as a means of evaluation. Moreover, there is often a long time lag between instructor participation and when a discernible impact on student outcomes can be detected.
This project is developing a more efficient and rapid way to evaluate the effectiveness of professional development and in particular to determine whether and how the instructors are changing their instruction as a result of participation. It is engaged in constructing and validating a self-report survey instrument that can be used to probe the initial classroom impact of professional development of college mathematics instructors, especially shifts in their use of class time and choice of instructional activities. The PI team is aware of sources of potential bias in self-reported survey responses and is focused on developing an instrument that is as free as possible from incentives to provide biased responses. Classroom observations are being compared with survey data from multiple sites to determine the conditions under which self-report accurately probes shifts in instructional practice that result from professional development. The goal is a validated survey instrument that will offer a general and inexpensive tool for measuring the impact of professional development in mathematics and, eventually, in science as well.
