Project Summary

Hezel Associates subcontracted with The Education Alliance to conduct an evaluation of the effectiveness of PBS's online teacher development program, TeacherLine.

The U.S. Department of Education funded PBS TeacherLine to develop and offer more than 30 online professional development course modules for K-12 teachers on a variety of curricular and pedagogic topics. Teachers enroll in TeacherLine courses through PBS station affiliates located throughout the U.S.

Over several years of funding, the evaluation has included an expert review of TeacherLine course modules, an experimental study of TeacherLine's impact, and most recently, a formative assessment of TeacherLine's new resources for coaches and mentors. The experimental study assessed impact on student performance using randomly assigned treatment-control samples in Miami-Dade, FL, Buffalo, NY, and Columbia, SC school districts. Using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol, Education Alliance evaluators assessed the degree of constructivist mathematics teaching in 3rd-5th grade classrooms. Hezel Associates also collected data using a teacher attitudes survey and pre and post-test data from treatment and control teachers' students.