Authors: Heck, Daniel J.; Rosenberg, Sharyn L.; and Crawford, Rebecca A.
Date: December 2006
The Local Systemic Change (LSC) program was designed to provide a substantial amount of professional development to all teachers of mathematics or science in a project’s targeted schools with a substantial amount of professional development. Because the projects were designed as systemic change initiatives, they also were intended to promote a supportive policy environment and to cultivate support from key stakeholders for standards-based classroom practice. If the LSCs achieved systemic change, discernible changes in teachers’ classroom practice may be evident on a widespread basis, either due to teachers’ participation in LSC-sponsored professional development, or due to the supportiveness of the context in which the LSCs operated. This study makes use of longitudinal questionnaire data collected from teachers targeted by the LSC projects. A series of three-level hierarchical generalized linear models (HGLM), with observations nested in teachers, nested in projects, was used to investigate both the systemic impact of the LSC projects and the impact of teacher participation in LSC professional development on teachers’ use of the district-designated instructional materials, and, in projects targeting science in the elementary grades, teachers’ time spent on science instruction.
Copyright and Usage: Horizon Research, Inc. (HRI) holds the copyright on this report. HRI grants permission for unlimited use, whether the entire report or excerpts, for non-commercial purposes.
The report should be cited as follows:
Heck, D. J., Rosenberg, S. L., & Crawford, R. A. (2006). LSC teacher questionnaire study: Indicators of systemic change, a longitudinal analysis of data collected between 1997 and 2006. Chapel Hill, NC: Horizon Research, Inc.