Interactive, Individualized Professional Learning for Elementary School Teachers: Enhancing Content and Pedagogical Content Knowledge as a Basis for Improving Practice

Mathematics plays a critical role in students’ career choices as well as their success in STEM fields. Unfortunately, math performance often declines as students’ progress through the grade levels and the aftermath of the COVID19 pandemic has worsened the situation. Research has shown that when teachers have strong content and pedagogical content knowledge that they can provide better quality mathematics instruction to their students and improve student outcomes. The goal of this project is to enhance elementary school teachers’ capacity to improve students’ mathematics learning through a scaled professional development program that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create a personalized, active learning environment for teachers. The professional development program focuses on key elements of content-specific expertise needed for teaching, such as enhancing teachers’ understanding of the foundational ideas behind numbers and operations concepts that are developed across grade levels, as well as teachers’ understanding of how students learn these concepts and how various instructional tools and practices can improve students’ learning. By creating a professional development that is adaptive to the individualized needs of teachers and is accessible to teachers anywhere and at any time, this work has the potential to change student outcomes at scale. The professional development program utilizes advances in AI to create an inquiry-based learning environment for teachers to enhance their understanding through solving problems of practice. Equipping teachers with the knowledge and skills crucial for quality teaching has the potential to improve mathematics teaching and learning at scale, which has the potential to reduce the opportunity gaps to quality teaching faced by underserved students.

The specific focus of this project is to enhance elementary school teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge of numbers and operations using a multiple-AI-agent to guide teachers’ development of a conceptual understanding of the content as well as ways to make the content more accessible to their students. Rather than AI delivering the information, the AI tool will serve as a facilitator to create a learning environment in which teachers meaningfully engage with purposefully developed activities and learn through the process. The research questions the work addresses are: (1) In what ways can advances in AI be incorporated into the AI-based interactive professional development program? (2) How well does the AI-based professional development program enhance teachers’ content and pedagogical content knowledge of numbers and operations? and (3) How well does the AI-based professional development program enhance the quality of mathematics teaching and students learning of numbers and operation?  The professional development program and AI tool will be developed through multiple iterations and inputs from several key stakeholders, such as teachers, teacher educators, and content experts. The study will use a mixed methods approach. The effectiveness of the fully developed program on instruction and student learning will be explored through a randomized controlled trial with 200 elementary school teachers. The final version of the program will be made available online.