- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2050641
- First Name Lukas
- Last Name Winfield
- Institution Education Development Center
- Role/Position Project Personnel
- Proposal Type Lightning Talk
- Workshop Category Track 4: Noyce Research
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Co-PIs, Evaluators/Education Researchers, Other Faculty/Staff, Project PIs
- Topics Lessons learned from developing/implementing a Track 1 project / Track 2 project / Track 3 project / or Track 4 Research project, Promising practices for preparing and retaining teachers in rural districts
Proposal
The Preparation for Persistence Track 4 project brought together ten universities and colleges with teacher preparation programs to investigate how these Noyce programs prepare scholars to be science and mathematics teachers in high-need schools, and the relationship between their preparation experience and their retention in high-need schools. We employed survival analysis, a statistical technique from the field of biomedical science research, to identify common teacher preparation experiences that significantly predict how long teachers stayed in high-need schools.This lightning talk will highlight surprising key findings from our research. Survival analysis demonstrated that none of the teacher preparation experiences by themselves significantly predicted how long teachers stayed in under-resourced schools. However, teachers’ perception of how well they had been prepared did predict their longevity in high needs schools. Additional exploratory analysis, suggested a possible positive relationship between teachers’ perception of being well prepared and the following program components : methods courses, content courses, practicum, cohort, and with their mentor teacher. Examination of these features among our program partners suggests large variability in their implementation. We will discuss the implications of our findings for Noyce programs and for future research exploring science and mathematics teacher preparation and retention in high-need schools.
