A promising approach to scaling up professional development: intelligent, interactive, virtual professional development with just-in-time feedback

Abstract

The scalability and accessibility of quality professional development (PD) is an ongoing concern in the teacher education community, yet little research has been conducted on potential solutions. We aimed to address this gap by developing an interactive, virtual PD program that uses intelligent tutoring systems and provides instant feedback to teachers. We then explored the role of this program in developing teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge of mathematics. We collected data from 60 teachers located across the USA and found that those who completed the program increased their content and pedagogical content knowledge.

Improving Teaching at Scale: Can AI Be Incorporated Into Professional Development to Create Interactive, Personalized Learning for Teachers?

“…The theory of change posited in our program was that by improving teachers' content-specific knowledge (i.e., content knowledge [CK] and pedagogical content knowledge [PCK]), we could enhance the quality of mathematics instruction. We have reported in previous publications that teachers who completed the program improved their CK and PCK, as assessed by both locally developed and external measures (Copur-Gencturk & Orrill, 2023). We also explored the impact of the program on student outcomes through a randomized controlled trial and found that the mathematics performance of students whose teachers had completed the program was statistically higher than the mathematics performance of students whose teachers were in the control group (an effect size of 0.18; Copur-Gencturk et al, 2024).…”

“…The program was developed over a 3-year period through an iterative process by gathering insights from experts and the targeted teacher population (i.e., middle school mathematics teachers; Copur-Gencturk & Orrill, 2023). Given that many students begin to fall behind in mathematics during the middle school years (National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP], 2022) and their mathematics achievement in middle school plays a critical role in their academic outcomes (e.g., Astin & Astin, 1992;Marsh et al, 2005; National Mathematics Advisory Panel [NMAP], 2008), we devoted our attention to a critical content area in the middle school curriculum: ratios and proportional relationships (e.g., Cai & Sun, 2002;Hoyles et al, 2001;Siegler et al, 2010;Thompson & Saldanha, 2003).…”

“…the program was determined based on an extensive literature review of the knowledge and skills needed in teaching these concepts. Additionally, we conducted interviews with PD facilitators and content specialists to further inform the design of the activities and the content covered in these modules (for further details, see Copur-Gencturk & Orrill, 2023). The targeted content and a set of activities were also shared with scholars in mathematics and mathematics education who served on our Advisory Board to seek their input.…”