Impact Variation in Professional Development

For whom do early interventions work best, and why?  In this project, we aimed to identify and understand the conditions under which teacher professional development programs are more versus less effective in improving early childhood classroom quality and child learning outcomes in the United States.  We leveraged cutting-edge statistical approaches (Bloom & Weiland, 2015; Raudenbush & Bloom, 2015) to quantify the distribution of the effects of the National Center for Research on Early Childhood Education's national Professional Development Study.  We also explore whether variation in treatment effects is predicted by characteristics both inside and outside of school walls.

This study was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Terri Sabol and her research team at Northwestern University and was funded by the Institute of Education Sciences.

Recent Publications

Sabol, T. J., McCoy, D., Gonzalez, K., Miratrix, L., Hedges, L., Spybrook, J. K., & Weiland, C. (2022). Exploring treatment impact heterogeneity across sites: Challenges and opportunities for early childhood researchers. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 58, 14-26.

Hanno, E. C., McCoy, D. C., Sabol, T. J., & Gonzalez, K. E. (2021). Early educators’ collective workplace stress as a predictor of professional development’s impacts on children’s development. Child Development.