‘E-Learning’ Report Shows Online Professional Development Aids Teachers and Students
English and math teachers who took professional development courses online improved their instructional practices and boosted their subject knowledge scores, producing modest performance gains for their students, report Boston College researchers in one of the first large-scale randomized experiments to study the impact of online professional development for educators.
As teacher performance comes under increased scrutiny, the findings point to online professional development as a powerful option to improve teacher quality, according to the report from the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative, a unit of BC’s Lynch School of Education and its Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP).
“A series of online professional development courses that focus on specific content and target student learning needs can have positive effects on teacher knowledge and instructional practices,” said Boston College Associate Professor of Education Laura O’Dwyer. “The studies also show that teacher participation in online professional development can translate into improvements in targeted student outcomes.”
The four studies were conducted in waves over a period of three years and involved approximately 330 teachers and 7,000 students across 13 states. During the course of three school semesters, teachers randomly assigned to the treatment group completed three online courses – each led by a trainer specifically prepared to teach each unit – and put in an average of 100 hours of training focused on three areas: content knowledge, incorporating that knowledge into instruction, and classroom skills. Teachers who received the training and their students were compared to teachers who were randomly assigned to the control group and their students.
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