What Can a Cognitive Coding Framework Reveal About the Effects of Professional Development on Classroom Teaching and Learning

We investigated what a cognitive framework for measuring classroom teaching could reveal about (a) the impact of a professional development (PD) program on teaching practices and (b) the relationship between teaching practices and student science learning. To conduct this study, we leveraged a collaboration between two entirely independent projects. The first project had developed a framework, the Teacher Tasks and Questions (TTQ) coding framework, for measuring teaching. The second project, the Science Teachers Learning From Lesson Analysis (STeLLA-1) project, possessed a rich body of teaching and student learning data. The two projects' independence from each other allowed us to examine the generalizability of the TTQ framework and to investigate its validity. The TTQ measures were applied to the data set from the STeLLA-1 project. We examined whether the TTQ measures detected meaningful changes in teaching practice from pre-PD to post-PD and whether they predicted student learning. We found that the TTQ measures did detect changes in teaching practices that were consistent with STeLLA-1's aims; furthermore, some TTQ measures also predicted student learning. We discuss the value of having generalizable measurement frameworks that can be used across different studies. We also glean lessons about data sharing across independent projects.