This "impact story" details how the Region 7 Comprehensive Center supported the Mississippi Department of Education in improving its Professional Growth System and building statewide capacity to support its effective use.

This study used a convergent mixed-method design and a pragmatic approach to examine how professional development (PD) affected teachers' confidence in their abilities to use the Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework in a rural Mississippi middle school. Grounded in Bandura's self-efficacy theory, the study aimed to answer two research…

Professional development for Career Technical Education (CTE) is needed to effectively implement food science curricula in secondary education courses. Providing CTE teachers with professional development training supports increased awareness of food science academic and career pathways among students. The goal of this study was to assess a food…

Statement of Purpose and Method of Study: The purpose of this study is to describe the perspectives, processes, and experiences identified during the implementation of the SIG Transformation Model in a rural school district in Mississippi. The Transformation Model is one of the four approved prescriptive models identified by the federal government…

This study explored K-3 elementary schools teachers' perceptions towards impacts of Common Core State Standards on early childhood education. A total of 54 teachers completed a questionnaire in which they were asked to rate the 9 questions related to their background, and then the extent to which they agree with 20 statements. The results showed…

The Science Teaching Excites Medical Interest (STEMI) program is an evolving collaboration of academic health science center-based biomedical clinical and research experts, graduate students in clinical anatomy, and Mississippi K-12 schools that seeks to develop a technologically-enhanced teacher-centered community of health learners. The present…

This report offers state leaders key areas for action to continue progress in implementing evaluation systems, even as federal policies on teacher evaluation relax state requirements. The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) offers its current best thinking for how state agencies can make the smartest use of funds, time and partners to refine…

This report presents a multi-year study of how states are implementing their state college- and career-readiness standards. In this report, the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) Benchmarking State Implementation of College- and Career-Readiness Standards project studied state efforts in 2014-15 and 2015-16 to foster effective…

By 2013, all 50 states and the District of Columbia had adopted college- and career-ready standards in English language arts and mathematics, placing a greater emphasis on argument writing to prepare students for life after high school. Solving the specific problem of how to help teachers teach to new standards for argument writing as well as the…

The following profiles address how the state departments of education are helping educators prepare for and implement the Common Core and aligned assessments through professional learning. The major professional development efforts around the Common Core were examined in order to understand the overall efforts of each state. An exhaustive list of…

Implementation of college- and career-readiness standards is some of the most important work currently underway in states to improve student achievement and public education overall. SREB examined the efforts of 14 states--including 11 SREB states--to support implementation of new college- and career-readiness standards. The goal of the research…

Implementation of college- and career-readiness standards is some of the most important work currently underway in states to improve public education and student achievement. This report provides a summary of findings from SREB's research into the efforts of 15 states--12 in the Southern Educational Research Board (SREB) region--to support…

The research to practice gap continues to be a prominent concern among professionals in the field of education. Traditional staff development in which teachers attend presentations and workshops for a few days each year has been one method for attempting to bring empirically validated instructional practices into the classroom. Unfortunately,…