Professional development of science teachers in Latin America: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

This review aimed to provide an overview of teacher professional development programmes for teacher training carried out in Latin America, considering the critical characteristics for PD reported in the literature. The 34 studies were analysed based on six critical features that were identified as being important in order to achieve a positive impact on the practice of teachers. The analysis allowed us to identify the presence of the following critical features: (i) duration; (ii) content focus; (iii) active learning; (iv) programme type; (v) collaborative participation; and (vi) coherence in the professional development programmes studied. The characteristic of collaborative participation is expressed in the opposite way to what is reported as effective in the literature. While the five critical features are not explicitly mentioned by the most studies analysed, a tendency to consider these features in the design of PD programmes was identified.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical features
• educational research
• Latin America region
• professional training
• public policies

Acknowledgements

To the Consejo Nacional de Humanidades Ciencia y Tecnología (CONAHCYT – México) for the support with a chair at CINVESTAV to the first author.s

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical statement

Due to the nature of this research, bibliographic analysis and ethical approval are not required.