The effectiveness of creativity, activity, service (CAS) professional development in Turkey

Abstract

This research aimed to explore the effect of professional development for the implementation and student learning outcomes in Turkey for the international curricula known as Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS). The research design was pre/post-test intervention design. The study explored students’ and teachers’ perceptions on CAS by pre-survey before the professional development workshop and webinars. After the survey, a workshop and two follow-up webinars were conducted with teachers and students. Participants prepared some school-wide improvement plans for CAS and tried to implement them over 7 months. Then, the study investigated whether these workshop and webinars had an effect on the CAS program by conducting a post-survey 7 months after schools’ implementing their CAS improvement plans. In addition to the student and teacher surveys, data were collected by observations during the workshop and webinars and feedback forms were filled out by participants. Surveys were divided into subsections to see the effect in different ways. Paired sample t-test and Wilcoxon signed-ranked test were used to compare any possible improvements across the schools. Results indicated that there was almost no significant effect of professional development on CAS. Feedback of participants was mostly positive about workshop and webinars and all participants found them useful to develop CAS implementation, and most promising in the overall impact of the PD program studied were the findings from the final survey of open-ended questions that reported on actual actions taken by six participating schools. Due to promising practice shown in the actions the schools were able to take, recommendations are made for further studies that expand on these initial findings.