The effectiveness of literacy professional development provided to a high school faculty

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.