Evaluating the effectiveness of a professional development program which was focused on the instructional activity design in mathematics

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of a professional development program on designing instructional activities and basic principles of activity design. The study is carried out with 100 elementary school teachers who attended a TUBITAK-funded professional development project (#108K330). This study is based on a portion of the whole project. The participants joined the project activities for four hours weekly and 16 hours in total. At end of the one-month program, to evaluate the effectiveness of the activities the participants were given a questionnaire with open-ended items. In this qualitative research, via content analysis the data was analyzed to determine the frequency of main themes emerged out of the analysis of participant responses. The results indicate out that the professional development program contributed to the teachers? professional development regarding their knowledge about and practice in designing instructional tasks. According to the Turkish school mathematics curriculum, it is essential to design and implement high quality instructional activities. Therefore, this professional development program will provide essential contributions to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of teaching.