This paper presents a quantitative research design investigating whether ongoing teacher in-service education is responsible for elevated student performance in a high-performing school district. The study employs three data collection foci: teacher performance records correlated with education levels, individual student performance records correlated with their teachers' ongoing education, and district-wide performance trends compared across multiple districts over several decades. The paper details the sample selection criteria, instrumentation and materials needed, data collection procedures, ethical considerations involving minor students, and methods of analysis using regression techniques. Findings will be presented through statistical tables and graphical illustrations.
The school district under study invests heavily in teacher in-service professional development, which is especially strong in the areas of technology and elementary school science programs. New teachers all receive mentors under an established mentoring program, and a variety of ongoing educational and training opportunities are provided to all teachers both during the school year and in more intensive courses during the summer. This district is also one of the top-performing school districts in the state, and it has been hypothesized that the ongoing teacher education is primarily responsible for this distinct and perceptible heightened level of performance. The teacher professional development research proposed herein will quantitatively address the question of the impact that teacher education has on classroom and individual pupil performance.
The proposed research will consist of three distinct data collection foci. In order to comprehensively address such a complex interaction as teacher education and student performance — when variables cannot be experimentally controlled for both ethical and practical reasons — such a multifaceted approach can create greater reliability and validity in the initial measurements as well as the results (Johnson & Christensen, 2010). One subject set will consist of teachers with at least a decade of teaching experience and varying levels of prior and ongoing teacher education. The performance of their classes will be assessed in light of the level of ongoing education the teachers received, to determine if any correlation exists.
Including minor students in educational research involves many ethical complexities and must be undertaken with minimal — and ideally no — disruption to the education process (Wallen & Fraenkel, 2001). For this reason, the student subjects who will necessarily be a part of this research will participate only via their records, after properly informing and receiving consent from parents/guardians and appropriate school and district officials (Wallen & Fraenkel, 2001). The success of a cohort of individual students will be assessed by comparing each year's performance to the level of education their teacher received during and immediately prior to that teaching year. Finally, the district's overall performance and its offering of ongoing teacher education will be assessed over the past several decades and compared to the same features in other districts in the state, in order to determine if any trends exist.
All individual subjects — both teachers and students — will be selected from the school district under study, though the subjects need not have studied or taught in the district for the entire past period for which their records will be examined. As the research is specifically designed to determine whether it is the support of ongoing teacher education that has led to the high level of performance in this particular school district, limiting the subjects to current teachers and students — while still measuring any potential changes in teachers or students moving into the district — makes the most logical sense. This also provides a narrow enough constraint to make the research reliable and practically feasible, without being overly restrictive (Smeyers & Depaepe, 2009).
It is hoped that at least fifty qualifying teachers and one hundred qualifying students will be found to include in the two individual research phases of this project. These sample sizes are again designed to keep the research practically feasible while also ensuring a high degree of validity and reliability in the eventual results, as long as the purposefully limited geographic spread of the study — that is, the bias created by limiting the sample pool to a single school district — is kept in mind (Kaufhold, 2007). Teachers must have at least ten years of continuous experience as fully certified and practicing teachers at the time of selection, and must have been in classrooms in the district for the most recent two school years as well as the current academic year. Students must have records from at least four years of formal schooling, with at least one year — and the current year — spent in the district. These characteristics will ensure the validity of the subjects' inclusion in the study (Johnson & Christensen, 2010; Smeyers & Depaepe, 2009).
"SPSS software and record quantification tools"
"Permissions, regression analysis, and confidentiality"
"Graphs and tables illustrating correlated performance trends"
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