By Kemal Akoğlu and Hollylynne Lee (North Carolina State University)
Information
Several reports on how to teach statistics (in order to enhance students’ learning and teachers’ confidence and knowledge in statistics) have been published by various organizations and institutions, such as Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) report (Franklin et al., 2007) and Statistical Education of Teachers (SET) report (Franklin et al., 2015). According to those reports, there should be changes and developments in the ways teachers teach statistics and also in the ways we prepare teachers to teach statistics. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have recently become more popular and offer an accessible way to provide educational resources to teachers. Professional learning teams (PLTs) are often used as ways to organize and focus a group of practicing teachers on a making changes to particularly area of their practice.
Lee and her colleagues created the teaching statistics through data investigations (TSDI) MOOC as a professional development for teachers of statistics in grades 6-12 and college settings. The TSDI MOOC has been offered every semester since Spring 2015 to participants from around the world. During 2016-2017, we have led a project to develop a sustainable way that the TSDI MOOC-Ed could be used by local professional learning teams to impact more local changes in schools and universities.
The use of blended professional development models that combine online course with local professional teams was thought to provide the potential benefit of having local teams complete an online course together.
This study will describe the ways local teams engaged and provide findings about the effectiveness of using blended professional development to impacting practices of teaching statistics. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify the effectiveness of a blended professional development effort to professional growth of teachers in teaching statistics.