The Science of Teacher Professional Development: Iterative Design Studies Across Content Areas

We are honored to introduce the May 2018 special issue of Teacher Education and Special Education (TESE) titled “The Science of Teacher Professional Development: Iterative Design Studies Across Content Areas.” This special issue grew out of the Teacher Education Division (TED) spotlight session at the 2016 Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) Convention & Expo in St. Louis, Missouri. Mary Brownell led this panel session titled “The Science of Teacher Education: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go?” With a sizable audience in attendance and many thought-provoking comments and questions directed at panel members, we perceived a need to extend the exchange that began there. This special issue of TESE is intended to stimulate further discussion and sharing of ideas among prospective and seasoned teacher education researchers for assisting some to initiate, and others to expand, their research agendas. In a broader sense, this special issue aligns well with the journal’s mission to encourage research that improves the teaching of children and youth with disabilities.

Specifically, this special issue offers readers more detailed descriptions of studies highlighted during the spotlight session at CEC and includes a critique of these studies with recommendations for further research on teacher PD in special education. The first three papers provide examples of U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), Institute of Education Sciences (IES)–funded research projects focused on teacher professional development (PD) and content-area teaching and learning with students with and without disabilities. A fourth and final paper serves as an evaluation of the three research projects based on assumptions of teacher learning in teacher PD and offers implications for future research. This introduction to the special issue includes background information about the funding agency and the specific types of research projects highlighted in this special issue, followed by a brief introduction to each of the four papers.

IES was established in the USDOE with the passage of the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002 and houses four centers including the (a) National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), (b) National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), (c) National Center for Education Research (NCER), and (d) National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). Although each Center has its own focus and responsibilities, NCSER “. . . supports rigorous research on infants, toddlers, children, and youth with and at risk for disabilities through advancing the understanding of and practices for teaching, learning, and organizing education systems” (USDOE, IES, n.d.-a) via its special education research grant programs. Currently, NCSER grant programs support the following research topics: autism, cognition, early intervention, families, math/science, reading/writing/language, social/behavioral, policy/systems, technology, transition, and PD. These standing topics have remained constant over the years with special topics introduced periodically to address particular research needs (e.g., Arts in Education, Career and Technical Education, and Systematic Approaches to Educating Highly Mobile Students in the NCER 2017 competition). The 2017 NCSER competition required all topics to focus on teachers and other instructional personnel responsible for educating students with or at risk for disabilities presumably due in part to the need for research outcomes on teachers. For the 2018 competition, IES reinstated the focus on a range of target populations such as students, teachers, related services providers, and administrators. IES has also supported predoctoral and postdoctoral research training programs since 2004 in order “. . . to increase the supply of scientists and researchers in education who are prepared to conduct rigorous evaluation studies, develop and evaluate new products and approaches . . . [to] learning, and design and evaluate tests and measures” (USDOE, IES, n.d.-b).

Research grants awarded in both NCER and NCSER use a goal structure that divides the research process into five parts: (a) Goal 1: Exploration, (b) Goal 2: Development and Innovation, (c) Goal 3: Efficacy and Replication, (d) Goal 4: Effectiveness, and (e) Goal 5: Measurement. Researchers submit their proposals under one of these five goals. The goal structure is intended to generate a range of research, development, and evaluation projects for addressing the variety of educational problems in the United States. Further information about the five goals is found at https://ies.ed.gov/director/board/briefing/ncer_structure.asp.

In this special issue, we highlight three NCSER-funded research projects: two under the Special Education Research Grants (84.324A) competition, and one under the Early Career Development and Mentoring topic within NCSER’s Research Training Programs in Special Education (84.324B) competition. All three featured projects are Goal 2: Development and Innovation projects. Historically, Goal 2 projects support the development of new interventions or the further development of existing interventions through an iterative process of planning, design, implementation, evaluation, and revision (e.g., Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003). Both the feasibility and fidelity of the intervention implementation are assessed, and end users, or those responsible for using the intervention, such as teachers, are of primary concern.

A Theory of Change that explains how the proposed intervention may lead to immediate, intermediate, and/or longer term outcomes guides the iterative research process. Researchers construct a Theory of Change by reviewing relevant theories of learning and existing research related to the intervention to make predictions about the impact of their intervention on both teacher and student outcomes, and is visually depicted in a Theory of Change model (see Clarke et al., 2014; Hernandez, 2000, for examples). Variables that may mediate or moderate the impact of an intervention can also be included but are typically reserved for larger efficacy and effectiveness studies (i.e., Goals 3 and 4), as Goal 2 development projects are generally underpowered to perform these analyses. Overall, a Goal 2 study is designed to gather pilot data revealing the promise of the intervention for generating encouraging, but not causal, outcomes with the intention of conducting a larger efficacy study (i.e., Goal 3) at a later point in time (see the 2018 Request for Applications at https://ies.ed.gov/funding/pdf/2018_84324A.pdf for further details).

All three Goal 2 projects described in this special issue address general education and/or special education teacher PD in a content domain (i.e., vocabulary/literacy, mathematics, and written expression). The emphasis on teacher content knowledge and content-driven instruction in teacher PD has relatively strong support in the research literature (e.g., Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001). As Desimone (2009) suggests, “a research consensus [exists] on the core features of professional development that have been associated with changes in knowledge, practice, and, to a lesser extent, student achievement” (p. 183). These features include content focus, active learning, coherence, duration, and collective participation. Of these five features, a content focus in teacher PD appears to be the most influential on student outcomes. Achieving a content focus in PD involves helping teachers better understand the subject matter content they teach, enhance their students’ content learning via instruction, and assess student responsiveness to the content instruction they deliver (Desimone, 2009). Nonetheless, the scientific basis for teacher PD is limited (e.g., Gersten, Taylor, Keys, Rolfhus, & Newman-Gonchar, 2014), revealing a critical need for further research in this area, especially to develop and identify measures of teachers’ content learning that also predict changes in teacher practice, as well as features that increase the impact of the PD on teachers’ knowledge and practice for improving student achievement (Desimone, 2009; Garet, Heppen, Walters, Smith, & Yang, 2016).

The first three articles in this special issue offer descriptions of IES Goal 2 projects. Each article follows a consistent format to facilitate identification of essential features of these projects, including a rationale or purpose for the study, the theoretical framework supporting the PD effort, the teacher and student population studied, how teacher and student learning were assessed, how the PD intervention was revised, key findings, and implications of the findings for future research. In the first article titled “Professional Development for Data-Based Instruction in Early Writing: Tools, Learning, and Collaborative Support,” Lembke, McMaster, Smith, Allen, Brandes, and Wagner target teachers of young children with intensive learning needs in written expression (first through third grades). The PD intervention was designed to impact teachers’ use of data-based instruction for individualizing the early writing instruction students receive and includes data-based instruction and tools, learning modules, and collaborative support (or, DBI-TLC for short). To evaluate teacher learning and the feasibility of the DBI-TLC intervention, the researchers assessed (a) teacher knowledge and skills related to DBI and early writing, (b) teachers’ use of DBI with fidelity, (c) teachers’ timely and appropriate individualization of instruction, and (d) student writing outcomes. Qualitative data were also collected on the facilitators and barriers to implementing DBI-TLC. The authors offer details regarding the iterative process they used across three phases of their research project, and also share online resources for teacher educators.

Teachers’ mathematics learning and teaching is the content focus in the second paper titled “Prime Online: Exploring Teacher Professional Development for Creating Inclusive Elementary Mathematics Classrooms” (Griffin, Dana, Pape, Algina, Bae, Prosser, and League). The researchers developed, evaluated, and refined a yearlong, online teacher PD program (i.e., Prime Online) for third- through fifth-grade general and special educators. Two cohorts of teachers participated in two cycles of design studies: one involving 10 teachers in the refinement and feasibility of the intervention, and another larger group of 23 teachers to assess the impact of Prime Online. These teachers taught the general education mathematics curriculum to students with disabilities, and typically developing students, assessed annually within the state accountability system. The authors report results from teacher self-report measures they developed, a published measure of teachers’ content knowledge for teaching mathematics, as well as a distal measure of students’ mathematics learning.

In the third article titled “Introducing the Content Acquisition Podcast Professional Development (CAP-PD) Process: Supporting Vocabulary Instruction for Inclusive Middle School Science Teachers,” Kennedy, Rodgers, Romig, Mathews, and Peeples address teachers’ vocabulary instruction in inclusive science classrooms using the Content Acquisition Podcasts Professional Development (CAP-PD) process. This process includes three interrelated PD components: podcasts with embedded modeling videos (CAP-TV), adaptable and downloadable instructional PowerPoint slides (CAP-TS), and feedback and coaching for enhancing teachers’ knowledge and use of specific vocabulary practices. The authors also developed the Classroom Teaching (CT) Scan, an observation instrument used to evaluate the vocabulary practices teachers provide during their classroom instruction. Fidelity checklists for each vocabulary practice were also created to assess the extent to which teachers used the practice according to research-supported guidelines.

In the final piece titled “Advancing Coherent Theories of Change in Special Education Teacher Education Research: A Response to the Special Issue on the Science of Teacher Professional Development,” Brownell and Leko use Mary Kennedy’s (2016) categorization of PD research to analyze how researchers across the three current projects designed their PD interventions to impact teacher learning. They also make connections between the theories of change, research designs, measures used, and teacher and student outcomes in each of the three projects. Brownell and Leko conclude their paper with questions and recommendations for the authors and the design of Goal 2 studies, and suggest directions for further research in teacher PD.