Evaluating Pedagogical Practices in Science Classrooms: A Randomized Controlled Trial Study on Teacher Virtual Professional Development with Virtual Mentoring and Coaching

In this randomized control study, we evaluated science teachers’ pedagogical practices via classroom observations following ongoing, intensive, and structured instructional support sessions. These sessions included virtual professional development (VPD) and virtual mentoring and coaching (VMC) that accompanied a literacy-infused science curriculum. Using a low-inference observational instrument, we explored the direct impact of VPD and VMC on fifth-grade science teachers’ observed time allocation in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) validation study. The observations were collected three times during science instruction from 121 teachers in 68 schools from 35 public school districts in the U.S. state of Texas, during the 2017-2018 school year. Preliminary findings revealed pedagogical differences in time allocation among teachers between treatment and control classrooms. We identified improved instructional practices within treatment classrooms, which suggests the intervention had a positive effect by enhancing the quality of pedagogy as well as the content-area instruction in science.