Teacher Professional Development and Student Literacy Growth: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

This systematic review explores the impact of teacher professional development (PD) on student reading achievement. The first part of the literature evaluates all available existing systematic reviews and meta-analyses of PD intervention studies. No quality reviews of PD and reading specifically (distinct from ‘attainment’) were found. There was a little overlap of studies in existing reviews. The second part of the systematic review focuses on the most recent intervention studies exploring PD and student reading achievement. The results of a meta-analysis of all high-quality studies are presented in the third part of the paper. This analysis showed no strong evidence of publication bias and an effect size for PD on student literacy of g = 0.225. This effect was moderated by the number of hours of PD whereby studies with fewer than 30 h of PD was significant for student reading outcomes (g = 0.367, p < 0.001) but more than 30 PD hours was not significant (g = 0.143, p > .05). Following a Weight of Evidence assessment, analysis showed that nearly all high-quality articles involved shorter PD. Weight of Evidence was a significant moderator, (g = 0.408, p < 0.001 for high-quality studies, g = 0.077, p > 0.5, n.s., for medium quality studies). Our review suggests that only high-quality studies of short teacher PD currently provide evidence of impact on student’s reading achievement.