A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Professional Development on Teachers' Knowledge, Skill, and Self-Efficacy in Data-Based Decision-Making

group-design studies of professional development targeting data-based decision-making processes

In-service and pre-service K-12 teachers

Meta-analysis of group-design studies, but the outcome is the TEACHER, not the child - knowledge, skill and self-efficacy in curriculum-based measurement and data-based decision making. Recorded deliberately for that reason. Graded C. The authors state the limitation themselves: the experimental studies "occurred under ideal, researcher-supported conditions", and significant heterogeneity survived every sensitivity analysis they ran.

Professional development in data-based decision making moves teacher outcomes by g = 0.57, and study quality did not moderate the effect. Set that beside the student-level estimates in the same practice - g = 0.24 (Filderman 2018), 0.37 (Jung 2018) - and the shape of the whole area becomes visible: it is roughly twice as easy to change what a teacher knows and believes about using data as it is to change what a child learns as a result. That gap is not a criticism of the training; it is the measure of how much of the chain from data to learning happens after the teacher understands the data.

Not applicable - the outcome is teacher competence.

No identified independent replication of the teacher-outcome pooled estimate; the later Shanahan et al. (2025) synthesis of ongoing teacher support reports a larger teacher effect (g = 0.86) alongside a smaller student effect (g = 0.31), which reproduces the same asymmetry.