BIO

Megan Maxton is a Psychology and Criminology major. She is from Tampa, FL and hopes to work as a forensic psychologist, and wants to earn a Ph.D. She is specifically interested in how childhood can affect how the brain develops into adulthood. She is also very passionate about clinical research.

Understanding the Role of Professional Development on Educators' Science Teaching

Abstract

Every person in our society has been part of a science class and therefore engaged with a science teacher. This teacher can be the foundation for how that student views the world of STEM. Teachers engage in professional development to hone their craft and develop STEM skills in their students. However, not all professional development programs have the same influence. In order to better understand the influence of professional development programs on science teachers, we chose to conduct a literature review of current programs and their influences on participating teachers and their students if applicable. For this study, we define professional development programs as Undergraduate Research Experiences(URE), Teacher Professional Development(PD), and/or Research Experience for Teachers(RET).
Our research questions that drove our choice of articles were: What is our current understanding of science professional development for science teachers and their students?
Are there differences in the impact for elementary, middle, and/or high school teachers?
Are there differences in impact by the teacher and student demographics?
Are there differences in the impact based on the type of professional development (RETs, UREs)?
To address these questions, we analyzed peer-reviewed literature by breaking them into categories that included: research question(s), type of research method (qualitative, quantitative, mixed), program type (RET, URE, etc.), description of sample/participants, results in summary, conclusion, and further questions. We are in the process of analyzing the data summarized from reviewing 20 articles. We look forward to presenting it in the final abstract.

Keywords: teaching development educators