Toward a More Refined Theory of School and Classroom Effects: A study of the effects of professional community on instruction and student achievement

Laura Desimone

The study is designed to refine and test a theory of how professional community affects teaching and learning in the early elementary grades. The analysis uses data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), a nationally representative longitudinal sample of 22,000 students from Kindergarten to first grade. School organization is a popular target for school change efforts, but our theoretical understanding of how school organization affects teaching and learning is limited. Empirical tests of such theoretical relationships are even more limited. This project focuses on one component of school organization—professional community—to extend and refine previous work in four ways. First, the project tests the hypothesis that structural aspects of professional community influence the social-psychological aspects of professional community. Second, the project tests the proposition that professional community influences teachers’ configurations of content coverage in class. Third, the project tests hypotheses about the effects of teachers’ content coverage on student achievement growth in mathematics and reading. Fourth and finally, the study extends the idea that organization drives instruction to test the theory that professional community influences the effect that teachers’ content coverage has on student achievement growth. The study will analyze interaction effects with (1) teacher beliefs about their efficacy and approaches to instruction; (3) school and class size and composition; and (4) student motivation. . The ECLS’ provides two years of data on a national multistage probability sample of 19,000 kindergarteners and first graders in 3,000 classrooms in 1,000 schools. The analysis will be conducted using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), which separately estimates coefficients for each level of the system (e.g., student, school and classroom). Within the HLM structure, data analysis will be conducted using a crossed random effects model for individual growth curves, which recognizes that kindergartners in the first wave move to different classes in the second wave.

About Laura Desimone

Dr. Desimone is currently an assistant professor of public policy and education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations, where she teaches courses in school reform, program evaluation, and public policy. Professor Desimone received her Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. She has previously worked at American Institutes for Research in Washington DC, the Bush Center for Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University, RAND in Washington DC, and the Frank Porter Child Development Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work focuses on standards-based reform, teachers’ professional development, school reform, school organization effects on teaching and learning, education policy and program evaluation. In addition to the NAE/Spencer study, she is currently involved in several studies, including: (1) a six-state study of the effects of standards-based reform on teachers’ instruction and student achievement in mathematics, (2) a study in 5 states examining the effect of early instruction in mathematics and student achievement in different mathematics domains, designed to provide comparative data with the NCES data set Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS), (3) an analysis of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) to study the relationships between teacher background, professional development, teacher’s instruction, and student achievement.