Examining How Online Professional Development Impacts Teachers’ Beliefs About Teaching Statistics

Hollylynne S Lee,Jennifer N Lovett,Gemma F Mojica

doi:10.24059/olj.v24i1.1992

Abstract

With online learning becoming a more viable option for teachers to develop their expertise, our report shares one such effort focused on improving the teaching of statistics. We share design principles and learning opportunities in an online course developed specifically to serve as a wide-scale online professional development opportunity for educators, thus deemed as a massive open online course for educators (MOOC-Ed). In this report we focus on a subset of 412 participants who identified themselves as classroom teachers. We use multiple data sources, quantitative and qualitative, to characterize changes in teachers’ beliefs and perspectives about statistics and identify triggers in the course that appear to influence teachers’ sense making about issues related to teaching statistics. Implications about specific course experiences that served as triggers for critical reflection and change are discussed.

Highlights

With online learning becoming a more viable option for teachers to develop their expertise, our report shares one such effort focused on improving the teaching of statistics
Platforms, tools, and internet access paved the way for many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other distance course offerings related to STEM content, especially statistics
We present our results related to the four elements of the course that teachers identified that triggered critical reflection

Summary

Introduction

With online learning becoming a more viable option for teachers to develop their expertise, our report shares one such effort focused on improving the teaching of statistics. Professional development (PD) for secondary mathematics teachers to develop their statistical content and pedagogy are being offered across the world, typically in local small settings in schools or districts While such efforts may effectively impact the practices of teachers in these small settings, the need for preparing teachers to teach statistics is much bigger than what can be addressed only by local programs. Two efforts to offer MOOCs on learning to teach statistics, with very different approaches, have been developed in the U.S The design of these courses and lessons learned have been shared by Lee and Stangl (2015; 2017) One of these courses, Teaching Statistics with Data Investigations (TSDI), is the focus of this paper. We offer a glimpse at one effort to use participants’ online activity, forum discussions, and self-reported changes on surveys to measure impact

Methods

Results

Conclusion