Effective Professional Development Characteristics Provided by School Administrators and Teachers' Decision-Making Competency in a Selected Vocational School in Qingdao, China

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between the perceived quality of school-based professional development (PD) and teachers' decision-making competency in a secondary vocational school in Qingdao, China. Guided by scholarship on effective PD and teacher judgment, the study focused on four PD dimensions - enhancement of content and pedagogic knowledge, provision of sufficient time and resources, promotion of collaboration, and contribution to affective gains - and three decision-making domains - planning, interaction, and evaluation. A descriptive-correlational survey design was used with 80 teachers selected from a faculty population of 98 at Qingdao No. 45 Middle School. Teachers rated both PD quality and their own decision-making competency positively. Collaboration emerged as the strongest perceived PD feature (M = 2.77, SD = 0.49), while evaluation decision-making received the highest competency rating (M = 2.81, SD = 0.47). No statistically significant differences were found by sex, length of service, or educational attainment. Most importantly, overall PD quality was moderately and positively associated with overall teacher decision-making competency (r = 0.461, p < 0.001). At the dimension level, sufficient time and resources were most closely related to planning decisions (r = 0.238, p = 0.034), whereas collaboration was particularly relevant to interaction decisions (r = 0.370, p = 0.001) and evaluation decisions (r = 0.524, p < 0.001). The findings indicate that vocational-school PD should move beyond occasional training events and instead prioritize protected planning time, structured collegial inquiry, peer feedback, and classroom-linked improvement routines. The paper concludes that professional development functions most effectively as an institutional decision-support system when it is embedded in the daily work of teachers.