Dr. Meryle Weinstein, and her colleagues, Menbere Shiferaw, a researcher at Mathematica and NYU alumna; and Kaitlyn O'Hagan, a doctoral candidate at NYU and former IES-PIRT Fellow, examine the impact of the Urban Advantage program on students and teachers in New York City. The Urban Advantage (UA) program is a long-standing middle school science professional development program that began in 2004 and currently serves two-thirds of all NYC middle schools. Through UA, eight informal science education institutions in all five boroughs provide intensive on-site training for teachers, materials for them to use in the classroom, support for school staff and administrators, and field trips for students.

Dr. Weinstein and colleagues published two papers related to this research:  "The Urban Advantage: Comprehensive Science Professional Development and Student Achievement" focuses on how the UA program affects students; they find students with a UA teacher perform 0.02 standard deviations higher on the NYS eighth grade science exam than comparable students in the same school taught by non-UA teachers. "Staying Put: Positive Spillovers on Teacher Retention from a Middle School Science Initiative" focuses on benefits to teachers, finding that current and former UA teachers are 3.8 percentage points less likely to leave their school the following year than comparable non-UA teachers. These papers contribute to a growing literature on benefits of high-quality professional development for both students and teachers and highlight an innovative and comprehensive approach to improving science education that leverages external community partnerships.