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Spotlight
Rossella Santagata
Rossella Santagata Researches the Effects of Video-based Teacher Professional Development (PD) on Teacher Knowledge and Student Achievement
Irvine, Calif., March 1, 2008
Professor Santagata came to the U.S. in the fall of 1994 as an exchange student following the completion of a Laurea degree (comparable to a U.S. Masters degree) in Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Padua, Italy. After taking a few graduate courses in the department of Psychology at UCLA, she joined Professor Jim Stigler’s lab and began to collaborate with him on studies focusing on mathematics teaching and learning. Stigler had just begun the first international video study of mathematics teaching (the video component of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study), which involved the U.S., Germany, and Japan. He encouraged professor Santagata to go back to her home country, Italy, and collect videos of Italian mathematics lessons. Professor Santagata came back a year later with 11 videos and, in the next few months, collected, with the help of a research assistant (Alessandra Barbieri), another 39. These fifty lessons became the focus of her doctoral dissertation, which compared Italian and U.S. teachers’ strategies for handling students’ errors during mathematics instruction.
Through this work, and her collaboration with TIMSS video researchers, Dr. Santagata learned about the cultural nature of teaching. Many of the instructional strategies that teachers use in their classrooms today look very similar to those used by teachers over 100 years ago. Every teacher has learned a lot about teaching before entering the profession during her/his experience as a student. As a result, strategies teachers use in their classrooms are often not perceived as didactic choices; teachers are not aware that alternatives may exist. Those strategies are simply the ones that they have observed their own teacher use. This view of teaching as a cultural activity highlights the difficulty in introducing changes in teaching practices. Teachers need to become aware of the strategies they use before they can embrace new ones.
Professor Santagata’s current research builds on this cross-cultural work and focuses on understanding impediments to teacher change and designing technology-supported opportunities to facilitate teacher professional growth. She is in the final year, as Co-PI, of a $1.6 million experimental study funded by the U.S. Department of Education (Institute of Education Sciences) on the effects of a video-based teacher professional development (PD) program on teacher knowledge and student achievement. The project has been conducted in collaboration with five high-poverty and low-performing urban middle schools located in Southern California. The student population is composed of 73.6% Hispanic students and 25.9% Black students; 40% are English learners. Seventy-two sixth-grade teachers and their 4400 students have participated in the study; each was randomly assigned to begin participation either during the first or the second year. This project is based on a finding by the TIMSS Video Study: that U.S. students in typical classrooms rarely have opportunities to engage in challenging work during their eighth-grade mathematics lessons. Although U.S. teachers pose problems with potential for rich mathematical learning—just as frequently as do teachers in other higher-achieving countries—they never maintain problems at a strong conceptual level as they are worked on and discussed. In this program, teachers were provided with opportunities to deepen their mathematical knowledge, to observe alternative practices (in the form of videotaped lessons), to increase awareness of didactic choices, and to analyze student thinking. The PD program was delivered face-to-face; it alternated group discussions with independent computer work focused on the analysis of videotaped lessons. Findings from the first year of implementation indicate that treatment teachers improved in their ability to analyze student thinking in videotaped lessons. In addition, students of those treatment teachers who reached a certain level of mathematics knowledge performed significantly better (on the assessment mandated quarterly by the school district) than students of control teachers with comparable knowledge. Professor Santagata is currently collaborating on several manuscripts, as well as a symposium for the upcoming American Education Research Association Annual Conference in New York city, that summarizes the project’s findings.
On a second project (also funded by the U.S. Department of Education through a $1.5 million grant), the Capturing Teacher Knowledge project, professor Santagata works in collaboration with Nicole Kersting and Karen Givvin of the LessonLab Research Institute, at the development of a measure of teacher knowledge of mathematics teaching that uses video clips of classroom instruction as item prompts. This study investigates the relationship between teachers’ abilities to analyze lessons, the quality of their instructional practices, and their students’ learning.
Finally, Professor Santagata is also actively involved in the UCI teacher credential program. She teaches a class that uses videotapes of classroom lessons to prepare elementary preservice teachers for fieldwork observations and student teaching. For further information on professor Santagata’s research and publications, please visit her website at: http://www.gse.uci.edu/person/rsantagata/rsantagata_biography.php.
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