Teacher performance under varying levels of support in online professional development

This study investigated the effects on learner achievement and attitudes of three levels of learner support (self-directed, peer-supported, and instructor-facilitated) in a three-week online teacher professional development course. The course content covered nonlinguistic representation strategies, a common topic in teacher professional development. Sixty kindergarten through grade eight teachers were randomly assigned to the three treatments. Achievement measures were a 28-item knowledge posttest and a performance test on which participants constructed nonlinguistic representation activity descriptions.; No significant differences were found between the three treatment groups on either the posttest scores or the activity descriptions. Mean percentage scores on the 28-item posttest were 84% for the self-directed group, 79% for the peer-supported group, and 73% for the instructor-facilitated group. Mean scores on the nonlinguistic representation activity descriptions were 7.11 of 8 possible for the peer-supported group, 6.86 for the instructor-facilitated group, and 6.59 for the self-directed group. Scores on the attitude survey were consistently more positive for the self-directed treatment than for the other two treatments and significantly more positive on several items for the self-directed group over the peer-supported participants.; It was anticipated prior to this study that the greater levels of learner interaction available to the instructor-facilitated group and the peer-supported group would result in better achievement by those groups than by the self-directed participants. However that was not the case. The results for the achievement measures were not decisive enough to provide a definitive answer about the relative effectiveness of the treatments. The attitude data and the relative cost of developing the three treatments tended to favor the self-directed approach. Further research on the merits of these treatments appears warranted based on the present results.