A Longitudinal Study of Teacher Change: What makes professional development effective? Report of the second year of the study

Abstract

This article reports on an ongoing longitudinal investigation of the influence of professional development on teaching strategies. The study has so far identified models of type and duration of professional development activity for a national sample of primary subject co-ordinators and secondary heads of department of English, mathematics and science. This article reports on participants' changes in type of professional development activity over time, extent of subject content emphasis of the development activity and subsequent changes to teaching practice effected by involvement in a longer term professional development activity.

Notes

¹CI means Confidence Interval. Lower means the lower possible (95% confident) value and Upper means the larger possible value (again, 95% confident). In plain English, this means that we are statistically 95% confident that the Likelihood Ratio of 3.18 (which says that the 2002 schools were 3.18 times more likely than the 2003 schools to return the questionnaires in the second wave) will be found in the interval (2.53, 4.01) if the research is repeated again and again.

²The sample consists only of core subject Heads of Department.

CI means Confidence Interval. Lower means the lower possible (95% confident) value and Upper means the larger possible value (again, 95% confident). In plain English, this means that we are statistically 95% confident that the Likelihood Ratio of 3.18 (which says that the 2002 schools were 3.18 times more likely than the 2003 schools to return the questionnaires in the second wave) will be found in the interval (2.53, 4.01) if the research is repeated again and again.

The sample consists only of core subject Heads of Department.