Digging into Keys to the Classroom

When you ask Geoffrey Phelps, Senior Research Scientist at ETS, about the nature of his work, he doesn’t mince words.

“I do foundational research,” Dr. Phelps explains. “Often my research projects take years: sometimes many years.” And it’s because of that sometimes extended timeline that he met with ETS Praxis to discuss his own team’s upcoming research projects. For Dr. Phelps, he’s looking “to convey research in ways that are understandable and impactful for a much larger group of people, and that happens on a faster timeline.”

And ETS Research’s collaboration with Study.com holds a special interest. Together, they’re examining the potential impact of Study.com’s Keys to the Classroom program. Through Study.com’s existing test-prep program and community partnerships, this initiative helps establish teaching scholarships for prospective educators of all backgrounds, thus combating the national teacher shortage and diversifying the teacher pipeline.

In a wide-ranging interview – the first part of which follows this section – Dr. Phelps delved into what he finds so exciting about Keys to the Classroom – the importance of its social mission.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Responding to a social mission

"Quality and diversity cannot be separated."

Praxis Editorial Team: Why has your team responded so strongly to Keys to the Classroom’s social objectives?

Geoffrey Phelps: Here is one of the major challenges we have in US education: our teaching workforce is not representative of the students that are in schools. Every year, the student body gets more diverse, and the teacher workforce does not.

There is overwhelming evidence that all students benefit from having a diverse cadre of educators. Students who have traditionally been underserved in schools benefit from having educators in the building who look like them, who share their background, who understand where they're coming from, and who can allow them to be successful.

Praxis Editorial Team: How does Keys to the Classroom itself contribute to resolving this challenge?

Keys is interesting because part of the mission is to diversify the workforce. A quality workforce is knowledgeable, professionally prepared, and also diverse. Quality and diversity cannot be separated, and Keys focuses on both, emphasizing opportunities to develop key competencies for teaching, like those assessed by Praxis, and ensuring that those educators are diverse. That alone is reason to be excited about Keys.

Praxis Editorial Team: And if Keys also helps teachers who often struggle with some of the licensure requirements—

Geoffrey Phelps: –then that is a double benefit! It would provide important supporting evidence for a program that already is so promising. The current research on Keys includes a relatively small sample of candidates and the research focused at a fairly high provisional level to get early evidence on how participating candidates perform on Praxis. This initial work will set us up for additional studies: we'll be able to do a whole lot of things that we can't do right now, like understand in more detail how the use of the program is associated with certain kinds of outcomes.

Focusing on the future

"The Holy Grail...is to be able to understand those learning needs in ways that you can start to differentiate and target them."

Praxis Editorial Team: What else are you hoping to learn about as the study progresses?

Geoffrey Phelps: There's a sub-issue – for some of the participants in Keys, they've previously taken a Praxis test, and they've not passed. Then they come into the Keys program really needing to learn content, often in a very kind of substantive way, to perform better on Praxis and pass the test.

Having that kind of data - where you've got prior Praxis performance and you can see, “Here's somebody who needs support in learning this content,” and then you can associate that with using Keys and say, “They've learned this content and can pass Praxis” - that kind of result is exciting! There are very few studies like this. Even more importantly, we’ll begin to understand something about how the teachers who are making use of Keys might have a range of quite distinct and different learning needs.

Praxis Editorial Team: Am I correct, then, in assuming that you see this work as more complex than just, “how can Study.com and Keys to the Classroom bolster test preparation”?

Geoffrey Phelps: We tend to think about test preparation as, the only thing we care about is evidence that it supports a lot of people in passing. But just as important is learning about the people that are doing test prep and not benefiting from it because that helps us understand how we can improve the test prep and start to support those individuals.

Praxis Editorial Team: And in theory, is that something ETS and Study.com could delve into after the study?

Geoffrey Phelps: The Holy Grail of this kind of program is to be able to understand those learning needs in ways that you can start to differentiate and target them with different designs in the program. And to start to understand things like that, you really do need more data. You really do need to have more users. You need to talk to people about their experiences, their learning needs, and what works for them.

We can start to build it out and develop additional kinds of supports and understandings that will lead to both improvement of the program but also improve impact by targeting the much wider variety of needs from the teaching workforce population that's involved.

Join us next week for Part 2 of this interview, where Dr. Phelps will discuss more specifics about his team’s plans to study Keys to the Classroom.

Want to learn more about ETS Praxis and its collaboration with Study.com?