This report examines effects of structural and process features of professional development programs on teachers' knowledge, practice and efficacy. It is based on four recent (2002-2003) studies undertaken through the Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme, designed to enhance teacher quality. The total data set for the survey study includes 3,250 teachers who had participated in eighty individual professional development1 activities within these studies. Teachers were surveyed at least three months after participating in an activity, which provided them with the opportunity to gauge the impact of programs on their practice. To investigate factors affecting impact, a theoretical model was developed based on recent research into the characteristics of effective professional development and tested using blockwise regression analysis. The model included contextual factors (e.g., school support), structural features of programs (e.g. ,length), process features (e.g., emphasis on content; active learning; examination of student work; feedback; follow-up), a mediating variable (level of professional community generated), and four outcome measures (knowledge; practice; student learning and efficacy). Consistent significant direct effects were found across the four studies for the impact of content focus, active learning, and follow-up on knowledge and professional community. Feedback was rarely incorporated into program design. Impact on efficacy was strongly related to the perceived impact of activities on teachers' practice and student learning outcomes.

Whereas findings from recent research highlight the importance of teacher quality in improving students' academic performances and experiences of schooling, substantive and methodological issues surrounding the conceptualisation and evaluation of teacher quality are not well-understood. Such deficiencies are particularly evident in claims for 'findings' derived from econometric research -especially from those studies that merely employ conceptualisations and proxy 'measures' of quality in terms of teachers' qualifications, experience, and students' academic outcomes. Moreover, the econometric models fitted to the available, mostly aggregated data, typically fail to conceptualise and 'measure' teacher quality in terms of what teachers should know (subject-matter knowledge) and be able to do (pedagogical skill). Nor do such models account for the measurement, distributional and structural properties of the data for response and explanatory variables -failings that all too frequently yield misleading interpretations of findings for both policy and practice.Following brief introductory comments related to current contexts, the paper focuses on two approaches towards the resolution current deficiencies -both of which have important implications for conceptualising and evaluating teacher quality, namely: (a) capacity building in teacher professionalism grounded in evidence-based pre-service teacher education content and subsequent in-service professional development, and (b) the specification and evaluation of teaching standards. The paper concludes by arguing that since the most valuable resources available to any school are its teachers, there is a crucial need for both a substantive and methodological refocus of the prevailing economic teacher-quality/student-performance/merit-pay research and policy agenda to one that focuses on the need for capacity building in teacher professionalism (and its evaluation) in terms of teaching standards related to what teachers should know and be able to do. Introductory commentsConsistent with the adoption of corporate management models in educational governance and the prevailing climate of outcomes-driven economic rationalism in which such models operate, policy activity related to issues of: accountability, assessment, standards monitoring and benchmarking, performance indicators, quality assurance, teacher quality, school and teacher effectiveness, are widespread.2 However, political, economic and industrial issues surrounding educational effectiveness are sensitive, despite the level of non-partisan political consensus (at least in Australia) regarding the macro and micro economic importance of teacher quality and quality teaching for equipping students adequately to meet the constantly changing demands the modern workplace (e.g., Bishop, 2007;Macklin, 2006;Nelson, 2002Nelson, , 2004.The global economic, technological and social changes under way, requiring responses from an increasingly skilled workforce, make high quality educational provision an imperative - (2...

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This study investigated the relationship between policies related to the recruitment, selection, preparation, and certification of new teachers and (a) the quality of future teachers as measured by their mathematics content and pedagogy content knowledge and (b) student achievement in mathematics at the national level. The study used data collected for the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics, which compared the ways in which 17 countries prepared teachers of mathematics for the primary and secondary levels. A consistent positive association was found between the strength of a country’s quality assurance arrangements and future teachers’ knowledge of mathematics and mathematics pedagogy. Countries with strong policies for assuring the quality of new teachers were also found to be among the strongest performers on international tests of mathematics achievement.