Describing and Evaluating an Exemplary Mathematics Elementary Staff Development Project
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to describe the model of a mathematics and science staff development cooperative and focus on the evaluation of the mathematics component. The Mathematics and Science Education Cooperative (MSEC) was a comprehensive, long-range staff development program to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics and science at the elementary school level. The special features of MSEC were (a) it provided year-round, multiyear involvement, and (b) each year an affective strand was included. Statistically significant student mathematics results from the years 1998–2000 are presented.
... Successful staff development projects for educators provide long-range effects in which administrators, communities, universities, students and even parents eventually receive benefits. 1 Quality professional development encompasses a wide range of opportunities for the purpose of enhancing educator performance and excellence. This article discusses the organization and implementation of a summit designed to target an audience of school media personnel. ...
... Additionally, the paper presents the organization and implementation of the summit. In the planning of any professional development activity, two equally important tasks emerge (1) developing the program and (2) selecting the targeted participants. The development of the program is based on the needs of the targeted audience; therefore, the targeted audience must be determined prior to the beginning of the planning process. ...
This study is based on the idea that the new vision of teaching and learning Mathematics demands support of the full educational community. One of the most important groups that affect mathematics reform is school principals. A previous study showed that principals possess many improper perceptions related to the nature of Mathematics and its learning and teaching. This study aims at developing a professional training program for promoting the elementary school principals' understanding of the new vision of teaching and learning mathematics. This program comprises two integrated phases: Clarification and conviction, and Implementations for principal's role. It includes a package of paper documents, videotapes, discussion sessions, and group and individual activities conducted in focused groups and on-line sessions. In piloting this program, many positive effects were found in principals' perceptions regarding teaching and learning Mathematics during and after applying the program.
“Evaluation as a particular kind of investigated discipline is distinguished from, for example, traditional empirical research in the social sciences or from literary criticism, criminalistics, or investigative reporting, partly by its extraordinary multidisciplinarity” ( Scrivens, 1991 , p. 141). It is this unique multidisciplinary feature of evaluation that adds usefulness when determining the effectiveness of programs seeking to integrate mathematics and science teaching and learning across elementary and middle grade levels.
In 2005, a K‐8 mathematics and science program celebrated its 15th year of service. The program was the result of education, business, and community partnership efforts focused on improving mathematics and science teaching and learning in schools throughout a metropolitan region in the southeastern United States. To date, over 350 K‐8 teachers have completed a master's degree through this mathematics and science education program. The director realized that an evaluation of the program would likely provide insights that would benefit not only the efforts of the program but the broader mathematics and science teaching and learning community. Hence, the National Science Foundation (award No. 9815931), which had provided start‐up funds for the program responded to this need and provided funding for a longitudinal evaluation of the program. The evaluation was conducted from 1999 to 2004.
This article focuses on the evaluation results for years 1 and 2 and addresses the question related to changes in teachers' classroom practice.
James Stigler is associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in the area of culture and mathematics learning. Harold W. Stevenson is professor of psychology and director of the University of Michigan Program in Child Development and Social Policy. He is currently president of the international Society for the Study of Behavioral Development and has spent the past two decades engaged in cross-cultural research. This article is from American Educator, Spring 1991, and is based on a book by Harold W. Stevenson and James Stigler entitled The Learning Gap (1994). Although there is no overall difference in intelligence, the differences in mathematical achievement of American children and their Asian counterparts are staggering. Let us look first at the results of a study we conducted in 120 classrooms in three cities: Taipei (Taiwan); Sendai (Japan); and the Minneapolis metropolitan area. First and fifth graders from representative schools in these cities were given a test of mathematics that required computation and problem solving. Among the one hundred first-graders in the three locations who received the lowest scores, fifty-eight were American children; among the one hundred lowest-scoring fifth graders, sixty-seven were American children. Among the top one hundred first graders in mathematics, there were only fifteen American children. And only one American child appeared among the top one hundred fifth graders. The highest-scoring American classroom obtained an average score lower than that of the lowest-scoring Japanese classroom and of all but one of the twenty classrooms in Taipei. In whatever way we looked at the data, the poor performance of American children was evident. These data are startling, but no more so than the results of a study that involved 40 first-and 40 fifth-grade classrooms in the metropolitan area of Chicago—a very representative sample of the city and the suburbs of Cook County—and twenty-two classes in each of these grades in metropolitan Beijing (China). In this study children were given a battery of mathematics tasks that included diverse problems, such as estimating the distance between a tree and a hidden treasure on a map, deciding who won a race on the basis of data in a graph, trying to explain subtraction to visiting Martians, or calculating the sum of nineteen and forty-five. There was no area in which the American children were competitive with those from China. The Chinese children's superiority appeared in complex tasks involving the application of knowledge as well as in the routines of computation. When fifth graders were asked, for example, how many members of a stamp club with twenty-four members collected only foreign stamps if five-sixths of the members did so, 59 percent of Beijing children, but only 9 percent of the Chicago children produced the correct answer. On a computation test only 2.2 percent of the Chinese fifth graders scored at or below the mean for their American counterparts. All of the twenty Chicago area schools had average scores on the fifth-grade geometry test that were below those of the Beijing schools. The results from all these tasks paint a bleak picture of American children's competencies in mathematics.
Data for the report were obtained through the cooperation of the state departments of education.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created the need for rapid development and implementation of nursing continuing professional development (NCPD) to scale up nurses and other health care providers to meet a surge in critically ill patients. Through retooling and upskilling nurses and other health care providers, professional development is more important now than ever before. A heightened need for flexible professional development activity planning that is fully integrated into the professional environment is integral to prepare nurses to meet the challenges posed by this pandemic. This article addresses strategies to facilitate delivery of quality NCPD educational activities in real time. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2020;51(7):297-299.].
Professional development activities have historically targeted teachers as the recipients of reform efforts. In order to affect lasting change in terms of what mathematics is taught and how it is taught, however, programs must recognize the different intersecting needs and perspectives of a school's education constituencies—administrators, teacher-leaders, teachers, students, and parents. Professional development programs that include components for each group have the potential to dramatically extend the impact of the resources dedicated to the reform.
