Evaluation of teacher professional learning workshops on the use of technology - a systematic review

Teacher professional learning workshops have been frequently used to prepare in-service and pre-service teachers for effective use of technology in education. Evaluation of these workshops is crucial to identify the effectiveness of these programmes in terms of improving teaching skills, increasing knowledge, changing attitudes, and developing capabilities which support the achievement of student learning outcomes. Multiple approaches for evaluating professional development programmes have been developed, though each with different emphases and theoretical positioning. In this systematic review, 41 research-oriented teacher professional development workshops on technology use were critically analysed to understand how such workshops are evaluated. This study examines content evaluation, instrument types, and common professional development frameworks in teacher professional development workshops and reports on their usage and alignment. Based on the findings, the majority of papers in the systematic review did not deploy comprehensive professional development evaluation models to assess teacher professional development workshops. The majority of studies did not report on the use of established instruments for the purposes of data collection. It was further observed that the majority of these studies did not attempt to evaluate different dimensions of teacher change or different dimensions related to evaluation.