Examining Path Sequences to Identify Categories of Teacher Informational Website Use During Ongoing Professional Development

Informational resource websites have been used in conjunction with teacher professional development (PD) programs to support teachers’ learning activities and to provide just-in-time and on-demand information. Investigations into ways in which these websites are used in conjunction with PD activities can reveal important details about professional learning processes, as well as providing a way to evaluate whether resource websites are useful and have impact on professional learning. In this mixed-methods study, the authors investigate sequences of informational website page views using a co-occurrence matrix algorithm approach to identify high-frequency sequences of pages visited by 56 PD participants during a 14-week ongoing PD program. From these sequences, the authors use a qualitative coding process identify five broad categories of website use among the teacher participants. The identification of these categories is a useful step toward developing more robust understandings of the effects of using informational websites in conjunction with other PD activities.