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UMI Project: Comparison Teachers

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Since the UMI project determined the teachers who participated as treatment or comparison teachers, this study worked with the data collected and archived. The treatment and comparison teacher participant data analyzed for this study were received from the evaluator of the UMI project in a variety of files, all data was coded using pseudo-codes prior to be given for this study.
The challenge for this study was to put together the data from these various files to determine the number of treatment and/or comparison teachers who had sufficient data for inclusion in each of the analyses. The sample selection data analysis for each of the research questions will be described in the following sub-sections:
Sample for Analysis of …show more content…

The thirty-third participant was matched with a comparison teacher two grade levels away of the same gender, ethnicity, general education status, and with each having over twenty years of teaching experience. Part of the issue with exact grade matching was the smaller proportion of comparison teachers of grade 5 teachers and the group’s larger number of grade 4 teachers. Since the grade level of a teacher was viewed as the most important criterion, the ability to match these teachers so well on this characteristic was viewed positively. All participants were paired with a person of their own gender and the eight African American teachers in the comparison group were matched with eight African-American treatment teachers who shared additional similarities. Owing to the average of 2.5 more years of experience among comparison group teachers, in a number of instances, a treatment group teacher would need to be matched with a comparison group teacher with more …show more content…

In this final matching, missing data were minimal with only eight of the 198 data points for LMT unknown. As previously discussed, these eight missing data points were imputed using an averaging method. The scores of these sixty-six participants would be analyzed over the course of a three year time frame of the UMI to address the first research hypothesis about differences in mathematics content knowledge for teaching between UMI treatment group teachers and comparison group teachers as measured on the Learning Mathematics for Teaching (LMT) assessment tool. A concern about this data was inexperience between the two groups might result in the significant differences in scores of treatment and comparison group teachers on the LMT at the outset of the project on the initial 2014 administration of the LMT. Due to the larger average years of experience might the comparison teachers’ LMT scores be significantly

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