Researchers Without Borders

This forum will target current PIs as well as potential PIs who seek assistance thinking about FOI measurement and analysis. In addition to an orientation to FOI issues and the resources available at Researchers Without Borders, we will invite program officers and grantees to share FOI-related questions in advance of the forum and then choose those that we think will of most common interest to address during the forum We will also take questions from participants during the forum and answer them at that time and/or facilitate discussions about these questions in the Researchers Without Borders community.

With the growing emphasis on evidence-based programs has come an emphasis on enacting programs with fidelity. Some assert that schools and districts must use programs exactly as written. Others, on the other hand, assert that teachers always adapt programs to the contexts and conditions of their classrooms. This forum will include guest discussants Gene Hall, Karen Blase (and others TBN) and will focus on whether adaptations should be allowable and if so, how much and what kind of adaptations are acceptable. It will focus in particular on school district and school level administrators (as well as researchers) and the discussion will address both practical and theoretical aspects of the issue. We will solicit questions from participants in advance and during the live forum.

Few studies guide researchers on how fidelity of implementation to core curriculum interventions can be measured and related to outcomes, particularly within efficacy and effectiveness studies, where the requirements for fidelity measures differ. This webinar attempts to clarify the definition, conceptualization, and measurement of fidelity of implementation and to guide future researchers in understanding how fidelity of implementation can be used to adjust or interpret outcome measures. Six concrete steps for assessing fidelity of implementation in evaluations of educational interventions will be provided.

Initially, the study was based on a theory of change that predicted that student outcomes would be affected by teachers’ ability to find and enact instructional strategies that were embedded in the curriculum materials. However, when similar strategies were found in comparison teachers’ classes, it was clear that better measures of fidelity were needed. The search to find them suggests that the initial theory of change was too simple. Not only are teachers implicated in fidelity of implementation, so too are the middle school students who participated in the curriculum unit’s activities. The suite of fidelity measures helped us to develop a more interesting and complex theory of change about these science curriculum materials and student learning.

The roles of infidelity in the intervention and control conditions will be discussed, along with the need to assess the “achieved relative strength” of the intervention-control contrast. Approaches to including evidence about fidelity and achieved relative strength into outcome models will also be described and illustrated.