Teacher professional development a cross national analysis of quality features associated with teaching practices and student achievement
This thesis ponders three theory based aspects of the relationship between quality features of teacher professional development (TPD) and national educational outcomes by using comparable data from the United States (US) England, Japan and Finland. Studies carried out in the US and England have suggested that TPD delivered with content focus, coherence, active learning, collective participation and longer duration is linked with better teaching practices and student achievement. However, there has been no systematic examination of the generalisability of this association into different contexts, thus data from Japan and Finland is used here to explore this aspect. Firstly, I analyse whether student achievement in mathematics is associated with TPD which is either focused on content (Chapter 2) or managed coherently by head teachers (Chapter 3) Then, I examine whether active teaching practices are associated to TPD with greater degrees of active learning, collective participation and extended duration (Chapter 4) I find that active learning is positively associated in Japan with all the teaching practices examined, whereas in Finland it is only related to project based learning. Collective participation is also positively associated with project based learning in Japan, but it is particularly detrimental in Finland, also for the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) TPD with longer duration increases the likelihood of using ICT in the US, cooperative learning in England and project based learning in Finland. Contrary to expectations, I find that the achievement of students in the English speaking countries seems to slightly decrease insofar as the coherence of TPD improves. Likewise, I also find a slight negative association for English and Japanese students in relation to the engagement of their teachers in mathematics content focused TPD. These results suggest, contrary to current theory, that the relationships between the quality features of TPD and educational outcomes are country specific. What is more important, they cannot be accepted in all cases as a panacea for rasing the quality of education.