User's Guide Overview
This User's Guide presents the products of the Applied Research on Science Materials Implementation: Bringing Measurement of Fidelity of Implementation to Scale project. The National Science Foundation funded this project at the Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Chicago to develop a suite of instruments for measuring FOI of standards-based science and mathematics instructional materials at the K-8 level. Over three years, the project team worked in collaboration with the Chicago Public Schools to produce instruments for measuring FOI of five specific curricula (Full Option Science System (FOSS), Science and Technology for Children (STC), Science Companion, Science Education for Public Understanding Program, and Everyday Mathematics).
Although the project focused on a set of instruments that could be used across these particular reform-based science and mathematics instructional materials, we found that the framework and its approach of using critical components as measurable constructs could apply to other mathematics and science instructional materials, and with adaptation, to other kinds of educational interventions.
This User's Guide will provide users with background on fidelity of implementation and how that work informed the development of the CEMSE FOI suite of instruments. It also includes excerpts from each instrument in the suite as well as an organizational matrix that illustrates the constructs each those instruments measure. User's will also find definitions of each of the constructs as well as information on the instrument psychometrics. Finally, users will find recommendations for using the instruments and descriptions of how they can be customized for use with other instructional materials and other interventions.
We encourage you to explore additional information about FOI on this site. Good starting points are the FOI FAQs and the Resource database.
