Time for a New Approach to Professional-Development Research?

January 6, 2014

Research by CEPR researchers Heather Hill and Mary Beisiegel is featured in the following Education Week blog post. 

In the wake of a number of disappointing, no-effects-seen evaluations of professional-development programs, several scholars are proposing that the research community upend its traditional approach to studying in-service teacher training. 

"Going program by program and—often at great expense—conducting large-scale evaluations involving multiple measures of teaching and learning has not, to date, resulted in an accretion of credible, usable knowledge within the professional development and practitioner community," the researchers assert in a new Educational Researcher article. 

It's a pretty tough condemnation of the state of the field, but probably warranted in light of the generally thin empirical research base on PD and the results of several randomized studies ofprofessional-development programs that had minimal to no effects on boosting student achievement. Such findings were especially frustrating, because the programs studied involved a lot of hours of training and follow-up, essentially the components that experts agree are baseline conditions necessary for the programs to be effective.

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