The participants were students and teachers. They used different treatment methods to conduct this research study. Darling-Hammond (2009) stated in her research article “three types of support for teacher learning: ( 1) traditional professional development workshops, ( 2) a professional community-based activity that offered support to teachers using new curriculum units, and ( 3) the Integrated Mathematics Assessment (IMA) approach, which directly engaged teachers in learning the mathematics in the new curriculum and developing pedagogical content knowledge necessary to teach the curriculum”. The students whose teachers partook in the IMA program showed the most significant gains in conceptual understanding of the information. This being an experimental study in teacher professional development an operational definition of the treatment could be a class in literacy instruction that teachers attend during the school year two times each week. As stated in Darling-Hammond’s article (2009) “These teachers attended a five-day summer institute and then met once every two weeks throughout the year to discuss their practice and to problem solve”. With analyzing the student work together teachers get opportunities to develop a common understanding of what good work is, what common misconceptions students might have had, and what instructional strategies that teachers used worked for the …show more content…
The researcher in this article discusses the supports to professional development and the things it does not support towards professional development. She acknowledges that because some teachers do not have as much professional development as others their students will not have an increase in their student achievement. Another threat to validity would be the different ways the teachers teach and discuss the effects with their (teacher) peers. The enthusiasm and knowledge the teacher has for the subject/topic may be different than another teacher’s enthusiasm and knowledge. The researcher in both articles completed quasi-experimental research design because the independent variable in the study is the amount of professional development the teacher has. In both articles it may be allowed to manipulate or vary how much professional development each teacher receives depending on the subject they