Experimental Power for Cross-Level Mediation in School-Randomized Studies of Teacher Development

• In Event: Experiment Designs of Educational Research Studies

Abstract

Professional development is one of the principal pathways through which we can understand and cultivate effective teaching and improve student outcomes. A critical component of studies that seek to improve teaching through professional development is the assessment of the intermediate teacher development processes that scaffold program content through three key types of outcomes—teacher knowledge, instruction, and student learning. Cross-level and sequential mediation strategies that connect these processes and outcomes emerge as an important design consideration in these studies. We derive formulas that track the power with which school-randomized designs can detect professional development effects as they operate through a sequence of teacher-level mediators to affect student outcomes (e.g., school-randomized professional development studies) and implement them in R and Shiny.

Authors

• Benjamin Kelcey, University of Cincinnati

• Fangxing Bai, University of Cincinnati

• Jessaca K. Spybrook, Western Michigan University

• Nianbo Dong, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill