Welcome to PDMOST – Professional Development Models and Outcomes for Science Teachers

 We are in the final stretch of the project. In addition to disseminating our research findings, we are currently developing a website to offer resources for PD providers and science educators (available this fall through our MOSART website https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smgphp/mosart/). The site contains a repository of online assessments in all grade bands and in all science subject areas to test educators’ knowledge of both science content and student misconceptions. If you are a PD provider, we’d like to know how you assess educators in your programs.

Hi Susan, Cynthia, and Jacqueline,

Thank you for this important and interesting work. In the past, I have used the MOSART student tests or portions of these tests successfully with teachers, and I am so exited to hear about your recent study.

In relation to your finding about time spent on foundational concepts, have you gotten any sense of how much is "enough"?  In several studies, including a large-scale RCT, my colleagues and I have found that 5-day Making Sense of SCIENCE courses designed to support teacher content knowledge and PCK significantly improved teacher content knowledge, PCK, observed classroom practices, and student content knowledge (Heller et al., 2012; Little et al., 2019).  However, in our recent study of PD scaling efforts, we are finding that, unsurprisingly, administrators and science leaders want or need shorter courses.  Many PL providers either opt for courses that are available in a shorter 2-day or 3-day format, or they shorten the 5-day courses to fit their needs.  I wonder whether your team has gained any additional insight into how much contact time is needed to improve teacher knowledge and what qualities/features of that time are most supportive of teacher learning.  I ask these questions, of course, understanding that there are many factors at play.  I would also love to hear more about the other PD factors you have found to be linked with improved teacher knowledge.  I'm looking forward to future discussions.  Thank you!

Hi Nicole, thanks so much for your question. We did look a bit at duration of PD and did not find an effect. That said, I am also going to hand this to Jackie who did the analysis and can speak to it better. It is interesting that administrators are wanting to compress the PD. We have found an effect with more content as a contributor to teacher knowledge. We did not see anything for duration and we had progrms from 1 day to all summer. I will ask Jackie to elaborate in this. Thanks!

Hi all,

I enjoyed watching your video. I and it got me thinking about other ways to assess and think about teacher knowledge and learning beyond pre- and posttests to get after what teachers might need or want from PD experiences. Your video made me start thinking about the literature on adult learning and what motivates people to want to learn. Starting from misconceptions is one way, but I wonder if you’ve ever begun PD from self-identified needs and/or interests. Do you have any thoughts on this? 

Thanks for the well done video! Along the same lines as Daniel's question, I was wondering if you collected any other information from the teachers in the study, such as self-efficacy, motivation, or even information about whether they were required by their district to attend PD?

Did you use the same assessment for all PD offerings, or did you used an equating technique across multiple assessments?

Hi Molly,

thank you for your question. We did collect other information from the teacher PD participants as to why they were attending the program such as it 'addressed a science subject they needed to brush up on','provided opportunity to learn new/innovative methods of teaching science', 'looked fun, challenging, or personally rewarding', provided PD credits and/or a stipend, or 'was required by district, school, licensing, etc.'. Those who attended a program because 'it provided an opportunity to learn new or innovative methods of teaching science’ or it looked 'fun, rewarding, personally challenging' saw gains in both subject matter knowledge and knowledge of students' misconceptions. Being required to attend by one's district doesn't seem to be helpful.

We also collected demographic information on participants' teaching experience, certifications, in/out of field teaching, etc.

We did use the same assessment with identical questions for all participants in all participating PD offerings. Jackie can speak to the methodology of the analysis that was used.

Thank you for your comments!

Thank you for clarifying that! I was thinking of the questions "about the program" outside of the content/grade level. My apologies for skipping mentioning the grade band and content area questions. Our grade bands were K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. Content areas are as follows: K-4 and 5-8:  Physical Science, Life Science, Earth Science, Astronomy; 9-12: Life Science, Astronomy, Chemistry, Physics.

This is a really well done video! I, too, have found in my own work that administrators are often trying to shorten a pre-set PD from a week down to 3 days or two-days compressed into one. I am curious as to factors that either helped or hindered an extended PD session. Was there any data collected around teacher preference for duration of PD? (i.e- after school, weekends, summer institutes, etc).

Hi Courtney,

thank you for your comments!We did not necessarily look at extended PD offerings per se, but compared programs that only took place in the summer. If they had an extended yearlong component, we did not look at that. However, we were able to look at duration as a factor based on the fact that of the many participating programs, they ran from 1 day to 3 weeks, to all summer (on an independent work basis). Despite other reports of longer duration being better, we did not find this to be true. In fact, "for most of the activities, time spent did not have a distinguishable effect". In fact, it is notable that "program duration showed no significant association with either [subject matter knowledge] or [knowledge of students' misconceptions] gains', which is what we were measuring. A factor of extended yearlong PD seems to be the collaboration and implementation of the PD piece among colleagues and would be interesting to try to measure. 

We did not collect data around teachers' preference for duration of PD, merely what was the duration of the PD they were attending that summer.

Have you thought about integrating coding into the 9-12 cohort?

The STEMcoding project does online training for high school physics teachers. Do you have any advice for us on best practices for teacher PD?

Good morning Chris,

thank you for your question. We have not looked at integrating coding into the 9-12 PD groups. We use the MOSART suite of assessments which are geared toward the science content standards, both from the NRC NSES and more recently the NGSS. We have only included the science standards (DCIs) of the NGSS into the 9-12 Life Sci, Chem, and Physics assessments but did not include any Cross-cutting concepts or Science and Engineering practices.

In our findings, a key piece of improving subject matter knowledge (in the sciences) and knowledge of students' misconceptions was spending time on content and time spent learning foundational concepts. In addition, the more engaging the PD the more participants seemed to learn. Also, " participants [in our study] reporting they attended the program because it ‘provided an opportunity to learn new or innovative methods of teaching science’ or ‘looked fun, challenging, or personally rewarding’ tended to have higher gains in both SMK and KOSM." These are the directions that seem to be most beneficila to participants when planning and putting on a PD offering. I hope that helps. For more, please see the paper with our findings, the link is given in the video.

I will look at your STEMcoding project, it sounds interesting!