'E-Learning' Report Shows Online Professional Development Aids Teachers and Students

"English and math teachers who took professional development courses online improved their instructional practices and boosted their subject knowledge scores, producing modest performance gains for their students, report Boston College researchers in one of the first large-scale randomized experiments to study the impact of online professional development for educators." writes ScienceDaily.

As teacher performance comes under increased scrutiny, the findings point to online professional development as a powerful option to improve teacher quality, according to the report from the Technology and Assessment Study Collaborative, a unit of BC's Lynch School of Education and its Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy (CSTEEP).

The researchers found improvement in instructional practices and content knowledge across all groups of teachers in the subjects of fourth and seventh grade English and fifth and eighth grade mathematics, according to the team, which included O'Dwyer, Lynch School Associate Professor Michael Russell, and research associates Jessica Masters, Sheralyn Dash, Raquel Magidin De Kramer, and Andrea Humez.
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e-Learning for Educators Effects of On-Line Professional Development on Teachers and their Students:
Findings from Four Randomized Trials (PDF)

Source:  ScienceDaily