Page 56 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

Primary Grades Teachers’ Fidelity of Teaching Practices during Mathematics Professional Development

and five teachers who had demonstrated a low fidelity of implementation. All teachers were classroom
teachers and licensed by the state to teach Grades Kindergarten through Grade 6. Lastly, each participant
attended and completed all of the summer professional development workshops.
Data Collection

The data used for this study was collected from the academic year 2013-2014 which was year two of the
MSP grant. The AMC Anywhere site provides spreadsheets for each of the nine assessments available
that show students’ performance on those tasks. A student will have several lines in the spreadsheet
that show each instance that their teacher assessed them in that particular assessment. Reports for the
four most used assessments (Counting, Hiding, Number Arrangements and Combination Trains) were
generated, combined, and sorted to show how many assessments were administered for each student.
These reports clearly showed the usage pattern for the teacher participants. From these reports a list of
teachers that were using the assessments several times with each student was created along with a list
of teachers that were assessing their students less than twice.
The online professional development (PD) was set up in three Modules that included activities, dis-
cussion boards, videos, and a requirement to respond to other teachers. These modules were examined
to connect the teachers that were using AMC assessments regularly and had high participation in the
online PD and those teachers that were using AMC assessments minimally and were either not engaged
in the required PD or did not complete all modules.
The participants participation in both pre and post survey is also included. The online participation
was scaled as 0 –did not participate, 1- participated less than the required amount, 2- exceeded require-
ments. Fidelity was measured by the use of the formative assessment technology. Again, a scale of as
0 –did not participate, 1- participated less than the required amount, 2- exceeded requirements. This
project included 6 districts of teacher participants; the largest district was used for purposeful sampling.
The rationale behind using the largest district for purposeful sampling was to have teachers experiencing
similar demands and schedules for the mathematics instruction.
Data Analysis

The module data were analyzed using inductive, thematic analysis (Coffey & Atkinson, 1996) and
researchers organized the data into categories by themes (Ezzy, 2002). The themes found in each of
the modules focused on depth of response, intentionality of teaching practices, evidence of data driven
instructional practices, level of interaction with their professional community. The data from the internet-
based assessment system was examined to determine the amount of assessments that were administered
per student and per teacher. The survey on teacher practices was administered at the beginning of the
summer week long professional development and again at the end of the PD that week. The survey in-
cluded open ended responses that were analyzed along with the pre/post paired sample t-test. The mean
scores and significance are reported.

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