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STUDY MEASURES STATUS OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Ensuring student success requires a new kind of teaching, conducted by teachers who understand learning and pedagogy, who can respond to the needs of their students and the demands of their disciplines, and who can develop strong connections between students' experiences and the goals of the curriculum. By examining information about the nature of professional development currently available to teachers across the United States and in a variety of contexts, education leaders and policy makers can begin both to evaluate the needs of the systems in which teachers learn and do their work and to consider how teachers' learning can be further supported.
NSDC has sponsored this initial report to synthesize what we know as a baseline to inform decisions and improvements in professional learning. We hope that each report in the series will answer key questions about professional learning that will contribute to improved outcomes in teaching and learning in the United States.
What we know
The full report highlights key findings and also provides extensive detail and citations from die research project. Here, several key findings are highlighted with selected detail and citations.
WHAT IS EFFECTIVE PROFESSIONAL LEARNING?
Sustained and intensive professional development for teachers Is related to student achievement gains.
An analysis of well-designed experimental studies found that a set of programs diat offered substantial contact hours of professional develop- ment (ranging from 30 to 100 hours in total) spread over six to 12 mondis showed a positive and significant effect on student achievement gains. According to die research, intensive professional development that offered an average of 49 hours in a year boosted student achievement by approximately 21%. Other efforts diat involved a limited amount of professional development (ranging from five to 14 hours in total) showed no statistically significant effect on student learning (Yoon, Duncan, Lee, Scarloss, & Shapley, 2007).
While diese findings are striking, they come from a limited pool of rigorous quantitative studies. For example, the studies described above came from a meta-analysis of 1,300 research studies and evaluation reports, from which researchers identified just nine experimental or quasi-experimental studies using control groups with preand post-test designs diat could evaluate impacts of professional development on student achievement (Yoon et al., 2007)....