PROVO — Nine education researchers from Utah landed a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to investigate how teacher skills in reading and writing instruction affect the learning of their students.

The research team will examine the effectiveness of teacher education in college and professional development after college. Ultimately, teaching education could be tweaked if students' abilities do not match what teachers believe works in the classroom.

The researchers — from Utah State University, the University of Utah and Brigham Young University — are charged with developing a test that will score teachers' knowledge and how well it is applied in first through third grades.

The test will have two parts: a paper-and-pencil test to see how much teachers know about reading and writing instruction and an observation section in which teachers will be evaluated on their abilities to apply their knowledge.

"This becomes fairly critical for a number of reasons," said Rey Reutzel, a Utah State University professor in charge of the project. "We're spending billions of dollars in this country having teachers take professional development courses, and if we can't reliably measure whether those have a reliable impact on teachers, and if the impact on teachers doesn't trickle down, that affects students.

"I pulled together a brilliant group of people," he said. "This has very sweeping ramifications attached to it, and I think it's kind of cool that Utah's the center of this."

The three-year project is funded by the education department's Institute of Education Sciences. If federal education officials are interested in the Utah researchers' test, they will fund additional years and the test will be developed for use nationally.

The test will be the first comprehensive measure of its kind, although other, smaller studies have looked at the relationship between teachers' knowledge and their students' test scores. Areas previously studied this way include how a teacher's knowledge algebra affected his or her students' math scores and how a teacher's understanding of phonics changed his or her students' reading abilities.

This year, the first of the study, researchers are reviewing academic articles about reading and writing instruction. They will then engage in a process of "classical tests development" to determine what they want to measure, develop sample tests and determine how they're going to measure the tests.

Next year, they will tweak the test, and bring it to a high level of reliability and stability over time.

"A test is never valid/invalid. It's valid to a certain degree," Reutzel said. "So we're going to try to make this test a reliable and valid indicator of teacher knowledge."