Abstract:
This study evaluated the effectiveness of the professional development (PD) provided
to a high school faculty on literacy strategies. Student achievement data of 9th and 10th
graders collected before the literacy professional development training began was compared
to the post-intervention achievement data (NWEA). The research was able to determine if
the literacy professional development improved student academic outcomes. Additionally,
teachers were surveyed to ascertain the differences in their perceptions about their
implementation of effective literacy strategies comparing the frequencies from before the PD
began to the end of the study. The independent variables will include: student gender, student
race, free and reduced lunch status, pre-intervention achievement data, teacher race, teacher
gender, teacher age, and teacher years of experience. The dependent variables include the
post-intervention tests for student achievement and a survey assessing teachers’ perceptions
of how the literacy PD was implemented in their classrooms. I was not able to use the timeseries design because too many of the values for the student data were missing. Therefore,
only descriptive statistics were used to answer the central research question and two sub
Effectiveness of Professional Development 2
questions, which was necessitated involving student NWEA data. Thus, there were no
statically significant results from my NWEA Data. After analyzing the pre-survey to postsurvey teacher data for Bloom’s Taxonomy, Core Literacy Strategies, and Writing Strategies,
it is evident that statistically significant gains were made from the pre-survey data to the
post-survey data for all three factors. My dissertation also includes a section on implications
and suggestions for future research.
