Evaluating Role Demands and Identifying the Needs of Instructional Assistants: Designing instruments to collect meaningful data about an overlooked population of educators.

Instructional assistants (IAs) are a diverse and often-overlooked, but essential personnel in many school districts. They rarely receive targeted professional development, nor are the subject of research, leaving little to no literature about how to best learn about and support them. This session describes how data collection activities were designed and modified to both learn more about IAs experiences and their level of pedagogical content knowledge, and then to implement impactful mathematics PD for them in response. During this session, we will describe modifications to and provide examples of the instruments used, and facilitate a discussion around instrument contextualization and modification.