Program Description
The Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative (AMSTI) is primarily a professional development strategy for elementary and middle school teachers and principals, who attend a 2-week training session in the summer, followed by on-site coaching during the school year. The focus of professional development is hands-on, inquiry-based instruction in math and science. In addition to professional development, teachers are provided with all necessary materials, including teacher and student guides, student assessments, software, manipulatives, and hands-on activities, all organized in “kits” that are rotated among schools.
Program Outcomes
AMSTI was implemented in a very large study in grades 4-8. The report did not make it possible to separate elementary and middle school outcomes, so it is considered in both categories. On measures of math problem solving, students in schools that used AMSTI scored significantly higher than a control group at the student level, but not at the school level, with an average effect size of +0.05. This qualifies AMSTI for the ESSA “Promising” category.
Implementation Notes
As part of this research (Newman et al., 2012), surveys were administered to participating teachers across both the treatment (i.e., those participating in AMSTI) and comparison (i.e., those not participating in AMSTI) groups to assess perceptions of program impacts using a series of Likert-based items. Findings from the teacher survey found that AMSTI teachers were more likely to report their students as engaged, had greater content knowledge in math or science, and increased their use of active learning streategies with students (by almost 25 minutes per week in math and 20 minutes per week in science).