Determinants of Teachers' Positive Perceptions of Their Professional Development Experience: An Application of Machine Learning Classification

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Eight
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Teachers' Beliefs, Views, and Perspectives (Table 7)

Abstract

Given the complex nature of teachers’ professional development (PD) processes, it is crucial to identify the relative importance of various factors that can influence their experience. By applying a machine-learning technique, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), we examined how teacher individual, PD, and school contextual factors were associated with their positive perceptions of PD experience. Using TALIS 2018 U.S. data (n = 2,418), we identified 16 important explanatory variables (out of 132 variables) in determining teachers’ positive perception on their PD experience. We found that teachers’ PD experience depends on multiple layers of factors such as PD activities (10 variables), teachers’ individual characteristics (four variables), and school environments (two variables). Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.

Authors

• Iksang Yoon, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author

• Minjung Kim, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Author