Students whose teachers regularly collaborate and participate in professional communities show more growth in mathematics achievement than those whose teachers are more isolated professionally, says a study in the April issue of the journal Sociology of Education.
The study also links teachers’ participation in such communities to smaller learning gaps between diverse racial and socioeconomic student groups.
For their study, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte drew on data from nearly 5,000 students who took part in a federal longitudinal study from 1998 to 2003.
