A study of the effects of a mathematics staff development module on teachers' and students' achievement
This study consisted of two phases. The first phase investigated the effectiveness on achievement and attitude of training third-, fifth-, and sixthgrade teachers on the Texas Education Agency's Probability, Statistics, and Graphing (PSG) Staff Development Module. The module required twelve hours of training and occurred over two consecutive days. The independent variable was the treatment. The dependent variables were achievement and attitude. The experimental design followed Solomon's Four-Group Design and involved 72 randomly selected teachers. Results indicated that the teachers who received the PSG training (experimental group) demonstrated significantly higher achievement scores in probability, statistics, and graphing and displayed significantly more positive attltudes toward the teaching of probability, statistics, and graphing. The second phase of the study investigated the effectiveness on student achievement of PSG instruction provided by teachers who attended the twelve-hour staff development module (experimental group) and by teachers who followed lessons from the district adopted textbook (control group) in the fifth-grade classroom. The independent variable was method of instruction. The dependent variable was student achievement in PSG. A pre-posttest design with nonequivalent groups was implemented and involved 111 fifth-grade students. The results from this phase of the study indicated that students provided PSG instruction by teachers who received the PSG module training demonstrated statistically significant achievement gains when compared to the control group.
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