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Looking in All the Right Places: Data Collection for Evaluation of the AMSP

Abstract

This paper addresses the following claim(s):

"We hypothesize that teacher participation in an AMSP (or MSP more generally) activity leads
to higher student outcomes for that teacher's students relative to students of teachers who
have not participated. We also propose to examine the degree of intervention necessary to
generate the hypothesized positive effects.


While enhanced student outcomes are the goal of all MSPs, one advantage of looking at the AMSP participation is the length of time the training program has been in place (it was one of the original MSPs) and the scale of the project. Because of the long length of time, we can test whether there are delayed effects of the teacher training on student outcomes. The project's implementation across 54 diverse school districts in 4 states also allows us to control for many factors that may influence outcomes that cannot be garnered from a few, similar school districts. For example, the socioeconomics aspects of the student body, the quality of teacher pre-service training, and the culture of the schools involved in AMSP vary greatly and can be accounted for in this evaluation. Overall, this means that other factors that may complicate attribution to the in-service MSP training can be controlled with this study. "