National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ATLAS Evaluation

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (National Board) launched Accomplished Teaching, Learning, and Schools (ATLAS), an online platform to provide video exemplars and corresponding written reflections of National Board Certified Teachers to help train new teachers. The ATLAS platform has been developed by the National Board and its university and district partners as part of a U.S. Department of Education Investing in Innovation (i3) grant.

The ATLAS platform is implemented in three states (New York, Tennessee, and Washington), with the goal of improving teacher practice and, in turn, student achievement in mathematics and science. Through the i3 grant, the National Board and its partners will pilot ATLAS use in six university teacher preparation programs and eight districts.
 

Project Summary

American Institutes for Research is conducting a formative evaluation to study ATLAS implementation and a summative evaluation to estimate the impact of ATLAS use on teacher performance and student achievement.
 

Project Goals

American Institutes for Research is conducting a five-year evaluation of the i3 grant. The first half of the study is formative and will provide feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of ATLAS development and implementation processes. The second half is summative and will focus on the extent to which the partners implement ATLAS use with fidelity, and whether ATLAS use has an impact on teacher practice or student achievement.
 

Research Questions

1. How was ATLAS developed by the National Board and partners?
2. How is ATLAS being implemented at the partner university and district levels?
3. What are the facilitators of and inhibitors to ATLAS development and implementation?
4. What are developers’ and users’ assessments of the relevance, quality, and usefulness of ATLAS?
5. Did ATLAS use produce a contrast between groups of ATLAS users and nonusers in preservice and early career teachers’ experiences with teacher preparation and induction?
6. What impacts did ATLAS use have on the decisions and actions of preservice and early career teachers?
7. What impacts did two years of ATLAS use have on measures of preservice and early career teacher performance?
8. What impacts did two years of ATLAS use have on student achievement in mathematics and science?
    

Methods

The following data sources are collected to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation: (1) interviews, (2) focus groups, (3) online surveys, (4) archival teacher performance data (from partner universities and districts), and (5) archival student achievement data.

A formative implementation study will use extant data and data collected through methods such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys to examine fidelity of implementation. A summative impact study will use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the impact of ATLAS use on teacher performance and student achievement.