Development of a Validated Self-Report Instrument for Measuring the Classroom Impact of Student-Centered Professional Development for College Instructors

如果专业发展服务的设计有良好的评估证据来证明其是否有效以及如何有效，那么扩大大学教师专业发展范围的努力将会更加成功。虽然提高学生的学习水平是大学讲师专业发展的最终目标，但作为一种评估手段，直接衡量学生的学习成果是困难和昂贵的。此外，从教师的参与到对学生成绩产生明显影响的时间间隔往往很长。这个项目正在发展一种更有效和快速的方法来评价专业发展的有效性，特别是确定教员是否以及如何因参与而改变其教学。它致力于构建和验证一种自我报告调查工具，该工具可用于探索大学数学教师专业发展的初步课堂影响，特别是他们使用课堂时间和选择教学活动的变化。PI团队意识到自我报告调查回答中潜在偏见的来源，并专注于开发一种工具，尽可能不受提供偏见回答的激励。课堂观察与来自多个地点的调查数据进行了比较，以确定在何种条件下，自我报告能够准确地探测专业发展导致的教学实践变化。目标是一个有效的调查工具，将提供一个通用和廉价的工具来衡量数学专业发展的影响，并最终在科学领域。

Efforts to broaden the reach of college instructor professional development will be more successful if the design of professional development services is informed by good evaluation evidence about whether and how it is working. While improving student learning is the ultimate goal of college level instructor professional development, measuring student outcomes directly is difficult and expensive as a means of evaluation. Moreover, there is often a long time lag between instructor participation and when a discernible impact on student outcomes can be detected. This project is developing a more efficient and rapid way to evaluate the effectiveness of professional development and in particular to determine whether and how the instructors are changing their instruction as a result of participation. It is engaged in constructing and validating a self-report survey instrument that can be used to probe the initial classroom impact of professional development of college mathematics instructors, especially shifts in their use of class time and choice of instructional activities. The PI team is aware of sources of potential bias in self-reported survey responses and is focused on developing an instrument that is as free as possible from incentives to provide biased responses. Classroom observations are being compared with survey data from multiple sites to determine the conditions under which self-report accurately probes shifts in instructional practice that result from professional development. The goal is a validated survey instrument that will offer a general and inexpensive tool for measuring the impact of professional development in mathematics and, eventually, in science as well.