Pennsylvania Math Science Partnership

 

The US Department of Education has passed through grants for this project to the Pennsylvania Department of Education to fund innovative opportunities to improve education and to conduct systematic research so that we can learn from the efforts. As such, each grantee and participating school districts are required to conduct both evaluation and research as a condition of funding.

 

The purpose of the evaluation project is to learn about the effect of this Math Science Collaborative (MSC) professional development on teacher content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher effectiveness, student learning, and student achievement. This evaluation is a requirement of grant funding provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Additionally, this project has been presented and supported by a member of your school and/or district administration (i.e. superintendent, math coordinator, or principal).

Our evaluation is designed to gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of this professional development. The evaluation project will involve gathering data at the program level to respond to the following questions: 1) Do teachers participating in the professional development improve their domain and pedagogical content knowledge? 2) Do teachers participating in the professional development increase their use of effective research based instructional practices in their classrooms? 3) Do students of participating teachers show higher levels of achievement than those of teacher not participating in the program? and 4) Do higher levels of content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and effective instructional practices yield higher student achievement?