Designing Sequential Mediation Studies of Teacher Development

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 4
  In Poster Session: Division D Section 2 Poster Session 1

Abstract

Teacher development is a principal pathway through which we detail effective teaching and improve student outcomes. A critical component of professional development studies that seek to improve teaching is the detailed assessment of intermediate teacher processes that scaffold program content through three key types of outcomes—knowledge, instruction, and student learning. Cross-level mediation strategies that probe and connect these processes with outcomes emerge as an important design consideration. We derive formulas that track the power with which studies can detect professional development effects operating through a sequence of teacher-level mediators to affect student outcomes. We probe the sufficiency of sample sizes that are typically used in education experiments and implement the results in the BLINDED R package and Shiny application.

Authors

• Benjamin Kelcey, University of Cincinnati

• Jessaca K. Spybrook, Western Michigan University

• Nianbo Dong, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Fangxing Bai, University of Cincinnati