Teacher Professional Development for the Digital Age: Making Technology Integration Possible

Abstract

In this dissertation study, I have examined the relationship between teacher PD, teacher use of technology and student achievement. In the first article, I evaluated the effect of teacher PD which uses technology on student achievement. Using robust variance estimates and meta-analytic techniques, I synthesized evidence from 7 articles (20 studies), and found the effect of technology blended PD on student achievement to be 0.174 (p<.001). Moderator analysis confirmed that student achievement was impacted when technology in PD was used for surface level features to teach teachers, but not to construct new knowledge. In the second study, I use secondary data from a large national database (TALIS), to build a multilevel model and examine the effect of technology in PD on classroom use of technology. Using ordinal logistic regression, I found evidence to suggest that technology use in PD has a negative impact on classroom technology use. The third article is a mixed-methods study, in which I use longitudinal data to understand the effect of a technology-rich PD on teachers’ perceptions of barriers to technology use. The findings from the third study revealed that there was no significant difference between pre and post program perceptions of teachers, and that the PD did not help them make connections between what they learned in the PD and the content they needed to teach. Implications for each study are discussed separately, and then synthesized and discussed together in the concluding chapter.