At the beginning of the 2004-2005 school year, school librarians participated in
a face-to-face workshop during in-service training. The workshop dealt with the
process of creating a TAKS Support Plan, a plan for the library to remediate
deficiencies on the TAKS at their school. At the conclusion of the workshop, school
librarians were given the opportunity to participate in an eight-week online follow-up
course that supported implementation of in-service themes.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of online follow-up and
collaboration on participant attitudes, quality of course product, and course completion
in an online professional development course for librarians in 12 Texas school districts.
This study used a posttest-only control group experimental design with self-selected
participants. School librarians were stratified by level of service and socioeconomic
school status and were randomly assigned to one of three environments. Two
experimental environments were used: (a) Collaborative Follow-up and (b)
Noncollaborative Follow-up and a control environment, Noncollaborative/No Follow up. The experimental environments were given additional information and support in
an online course to aid the creation of their TAKS Support Plan.
Results indicate that the professional development program that included online
collaboration and follow-up produced more positive attitudes towards the professional
development program than the professional development program with no
collaboration or follow-up. Attitudes towards the online professional development
experience from the two experimental environments were mildly positive with no
significant difference across groups. Attitudes towards the professional development
experience in the control environment were significantly less positive than the
experimental environments. Logistic regression revealed that the likelihood of
completion could be predicted by membership in professional development
environment. The likelihood of completion by participants in the Collaborative Followup
environment was significantly greater than participants in the Noncollaborative
Follow-up and Noncollaborative/No Follow-up environments. No difference was found
in completion rates between the other two environments. Credential proved to effect
TAKS Support Plan completion. Master's degree holders in the Noncollaborative
Follow-up environment and master's and bachelor's degree holders in the
Noncollaborative/No Follow-up environment were less likely to complete than these
levels in the Collaborative Follow-up environment.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/3214 |
| Date | 12 April 2006 |
| Creators | Green, Mary Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Cifuentes, Lauren |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | 887806 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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