Measuring Teacher Learning Outcomes in Online Video-Based Learning Environments

• In Event: Innovations in Video-Intensive STEM Professional Development in Online and Blended Environments

Abstract

Teacher professional development (PD) can have many different objectives. Among the most important objectives include finding ways both to improve teacher practice and to improve student learning outcomes. Previous efforts to understand how PD impacts teacher practice—and, through these changes in practice, student outcomes—have relied on various ways to measure teacher responses to PD. Many of these measures have relied on teacher responses to classroom videos, or what Sherin and colleagues label as “teacher noticing.” Along these lines, we have developed a measure of noticing that prioritizes teacher reflection. We chose to develop this measure based on the theoretical proposition that reflection on practice is essential to knowledge change (following Dewey, 1933, among others).

Across several studies, we have collected data with 300 teachers to assess their reflection, as measured by the comments they write after watching elementary mathematics classroom video clips.

In this poster, we plan to share our results regarding three outcomes:

1. The association of teacher reflection with teacher background (including years of teaching, school location) and teacher endorsement of growth mindset for both learning mathematics and for teaching;

2. The association of teacher reflection with specific features of the video clips (including the prompts that guide teacher comments and the specific videos on which they comment); and

3. The association of teacher reflection to other measures of teacher noticing (in particular to their “usable knowledge” as measured by Kersting’s Classroom Video Analysis measure) and to teachers’ self-assessed likelihood to change practice.

We plan to discuss how these results inform our understanding of teacher PD and how reflective commentary may be related to supporting improvement of teaching practice and, ultimately, student learning outcomes.

Authors

• Meg Bates, University of Illinois

• Michelle Perry, University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign

• Joseph R. Cimpian, New York University

• Shereen Oca Beilstein, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Cheryl Moran, University of Chicago

• Kate Curry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Victoria Jay, University of Wisconsin - Madison