Impact and Design of a National-scale Professional Development Program for Mathematics Teachers

Abstract

By examining the effects of a national-scale teacher professional development (PD) program on instructional practices and student mathematics achievement, we contribute to calls for empirical studies investigating the impacts of such programs conducted at scale. The program corresponds well with core critical features of high-quality teacher PD and mathematics instruction identified in the literature, and the results indicate that it has had a small but statistical significant impact on teachers’ instructional practices. However, no effect was found for student achievement. These results raise questions as to the importance of the critical features and how programs incorporating all of them affect instructional practices and student achievement.