Evaluation Design Report for the Georgia Improving General Education Quality Project's Training Educators for Excellence Activity

The Millennium Challenge Corporation seeks to support Georgia’s efforts to improve educational outcomes by sponsoring the Improving General Education Quality (IGEQ) Project. One of the three components of the IGEQ Project is the Training Educators for Excellence (TEE) activity, which aims to improve classroom instruction in the subjects of science, technology, English, geography, and math in grades 7–12, through a combination of professional development activities for teachers and school directors. Examples of these activities include an initial core set of teacher training modules related to general pedagogy, student-centered learning approaches, and formative assessment techniques; a second subject-specific set of training modules for teachers to adapt material from the core modules to specific academic subjects; and a series of training modules for school directors focused on school management techniques, including structured approaches to teacher observation.

Mathematica Policy Research is designing and implementing a rigorous evaluation of the IGEQ Project’s TEE activity to determine its ultimate impact on both intermediate and long-term outcomes, including the school-management skills of school directors and teachers’ pedagogical and classroom management practices. For the TEE activity evaluation, described in this evaluation design report, we propose a mixed-methods study design with two components: a performance evaluation and an impact evaluation using a matched comparison group design. The performance evaluation will collect information about how the TEE activity was implemented, test whether program activities were implemented as designed, and assess if the practices of trained teachers and school directors align with the activities’ targeted set of practices related to classroom instruction and school management. The impact evaluation will compare the outcomes of a group of teachers who will be trained during the 2016–2017 school year with a matched group of teachers who will not be trained until the 2017–2018 school year. This design is well suited to estimate the initial impacts of the program on teachers’ knowledge about the types of practices covered in the training intervention, along with teachers’ attitudes toward those practices and reported willingness to use them in the future. The TEE evaluation will analyze several different types of data, including program documentation, survey data collected in September 2017 and September 2018, and qualitative research collected during the 2017-2018 school year.