After providing professional development training to Project Lead The Way (PLTW) teachers for as many as seven years, enrollment continues to be strong in Maryland and in other states that replicated The Community College of Baltimore County's (CCBC) model. CCBC's training program was developed in response to requests by PLTW teachers and school administrators for additional training and has been offered since Fall 2007. With support from the National Science Foundation, a train-the-trainer program was designed and put in place to implement the Maryland professional development training model in other parts of the country. Beginning in Fall 2010, the Maryland Coordinator and content experts trained and collaborated with their counterparts from eight PLTW Affiliate Universities across the country, gathering input and feedback on lesson plans, assessments, and frequency of training. As changes were made in the PLTW curriculum, materials were developed for new subject matter, including a new digital electronics platform. The full day training sessions, which reinforce and build on knowledge gained during PLTW summer core training programs, are designed to build teacher confidence and to make them better instructors. Learning a new software package or technical material such as Autodesk Inventor, VEX with ROBOTC, Autodesk Revit, digital electronics or civil engineering topics in an intensive two week period is challenging. Although PLTW provides assistance to teachers through the year via their online Virtual Academy, results from the professional development sessions show that teachers experience substantial gains in knowledge and confidence from attending the face-to-face training sessions with expert trainers. For each training session, teachers were required to take a pre- and post-assessment as well as complete a survey to gather data and document the success of the program. Between Fall 2010 and March 2015, a total of 212 training sessions were conducted in nine states with an attendance of 2,134 teachers (teachers were counted each time they attended a session). The results for 2013-2014 were similar to previous years with the greatest pre-to-post increase on a 100 point scale occuring in Civil Engineering (+41 points), followed by Inventor Level 2 (+ 35 points), Inventor Level 3 (+34 points), VEX Sessions 1 and 2 (+33 points), Digital Electronics - Sequential Logic (+31 points), Inventor Level 1 (+29 points), Digital Electronics - Combinational Logic (+27) and Revit (+22 points). Across all sessions, the mean of the pre-assessment cohort scores ranged from a low of 35% for Civil Engineering to a high of 63% for Revit. The means for the remaining sessions were 52 to 58%. Of the teachers attending the training, 71% were male and 29% were female; 74% were high school teachers and 26% were middle school teachers.
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