Simulation the Green Valley School

¶ … Simulation The Green Valley School District invests heavily in teacher in-service, which is especially strong in the areas of technology and elementary school science programs. New teachers all receive mentors under the mentoring program that has been put into place, and a variety of ongoing educational and training opportunities are provided to all teachers both during the school year and in more intensive courses during the summer.

This district is also one of the top-performing school districts in the state, and it has been hypothesized that the ongoing teacher education is primarily responsible for this distinct and perceptible heightened level of performance. The research proposed herein will quantitatively address the question of the impact that teacher education has on classroom and individual pupil performance. Research Design and Approach The proposed research will consists of three distinct data collection foci.

In order to comprehensively address such a complex interaction as teacher education and student performance when variables cannot be experimentally controlled for ethical as well as practical reasons, such a multifaceted approach can create greater reliability and validity in the initial measurements as well as the results (Johnson & Christensen 2010). One subject set will consist of teachers with at least a decade of teaching experience and varying/changing levels of prior and ongoing teacher education.

The performance of their classes will be assessed in light of the level of ongoing education the teachers received to determine if any correlation exists. Including minor students in educational research involves many ethical complexities and must be undertaken with minimal -- and hopefully, no -- disruption in the education process (Wallen & Fraenkel 2001).

For this reason, the student subjects that will necessarily be a part of this research will participate only via their records, after properly informing and receiving consent from parents/guardians and appropriate school and district officials (Wallen & Fraenkel 2001). The success of a cohort of individual students will be assessed by comparing each years' performance to the level of education their teacher received during and immediately prior to that teaching year.

Finally, the district's overall performance and its offering of ongoing teacher education will be assessed over the past several decades, and compared o the same feature sin other districts in the state in order to determine if any trends exist. Setting and Sample All individual subjects, both teachers and students, will be selected from the Green Valley school District, though the subjects need not have studied or taught in the district for the entire past period for which their records will be examined.

As the research is specifically designed to determine if it is the support of ongoing teacher education that has led to the high level of performance in this particular school district, limiting the subjects to current teachers and students while still measuring any potential changes in teachers or students moving into the district makes the most logical sense. This also provides a narrow enough constraint to make the research reliable and practically feasible, while not being overly restrictive (Smeyers & Depaepe 2010).

It is hoped that at least fifty qualifying teachers and one hundred qualifying students will be found to include in the two individual research phases of this project. These sample sizes, again, are designed to keep the research practically feasible while also ensuring a great deal of validity and reliability in the eventual results, as long as the purposefully limited geographic spread of the study (i.e. The bias created by limiting the sample pool to the Green Valley School District) is kept in mind (Kaufhold 2007).

Teachers must have at least ten years continuous experience as fully certified and practicing teachers at the time of selection, and must have been in classrooms in the Green Valley School District for the most recent two school years (as well as the current academic year). Students must have records from at least four years of formal schooling, with at least one year (and the current year) at Green Valley. These characteristics will ensure the validity of the subjects' inclusion in the study (Johnson & Christensen 2010; Smeyers & Depaepe 2010).

Instrumentation and Materials The materials use required for conducting this research and analyzing the raw data collected will be minimal. A standard computer with sufficient and readily available statistical software (such as the standard SPSS) will be sufficient for both data storage and analysis, and even for much of the data collection, it is assumed. Depending on the accessibility of student and teacher records once proper authorization from all relevant parties has been obtained, it might be possible to conduct the majority of the research from this single computer.

An instrument to quantify the data contained in teacher and student performance reports may or may not be necessary, depending on the specifics of the school's record keeping statistics and overall system. If quantified information that reflects the specific performance areas identified as key measurements already exists, no further instrumentation will be necessary; statistical tables can be created directly from the records obtained.

A method of standardizing and/or quantifying records might be needed, however, at which point a more intensive review of previous literature will be undertaken in order to identify a reliable tool that can be adapted to the purposes and needs of this specific research (Wallen & Fraenkel 2001). Once teacher education levels student performances have been quantified, the raw data can easily be made available in table form as well as analyzed, through standard regression techniques, to determine any existing correlation (Kaufhold 2007).

Data Collection, Analysis, and Presentation The data collection processes will consist entirely of obtaining proper permissions from parents/guardians of student subjects (as well as the students themselves when over the age of 14), teachers, and other appropriate officials and administrators, then collecting records regarding student/classroom performance and levels of teacher education. As all of this information is available to the public school system, it is not expected to create major ethical concerns, though confidentiality and anonymity will be strictly maintained (Wallen & Fraenkel 2001).

All variables will be measured on interval scales, with regression analysis performed to determine any correlation. When examining the district's history of performance and its record of offering ongoing teacher education over the long-term, issues of confidentiality no longer really apply and a great deal of the information necessary.