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Title: Professional Development for the Redesigned AP Biology Exam: Teacher Participation Patterns and Student Outcomes.
In an era of high-stakes accountability and widespread calls for improved student performance in science, technology, engineering, and math (National Research Council, 2002), it is critical that we also focus on how to support and enhance teachers’ learning. Teachers have long been understood to play a key role in the performance of students (e.g., Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004). Educational policymakers have become increasingly focused on “value-added” approaches to gauging teacher performance (McCaffrey, Lockwood, Koretz, Louis, & Hamilton, 2004), which attempt to directly link the contribution of individual teachers to their students’ subsequent test performance, in both the near and far term. We take the position that, no matter what one thinks about the current testing and evaluation regime, it makes sense to conduct research to improve our understanding of how to support teachers’ ongoing learning and efforts to improve their practice related to student outcomes. This paper reports on a study of teacher learning in a context that is especially apt in the current policy climate – how teachers learn to teach a curriculum associated with a recently-revised high stakes examination. In particular, we report early results from a study of high school teachers learning to teach the revised Advanced Placement Biology curriculum as they prepare students for a high-stakes examination. We examine the role of professional development in supporting teachers’ learning to use the revised Advanced Placement Biology curriculum and the relationship between teachers’ professional development choices and subsequent student performance on the Advanced Placement Biology examination.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1221861
PAR ID:
10067593
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Date Published:
Journal Name:
American Educational Research Association
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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