BSCS Curriculum Development

1. BSCS Curriculum Development • Curriculum design informed by • Coherence Mapping • Understanding By Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998) • research on malleable factors (e.g., How People Learn, NAEP) and fidelity instruments • Teacher-support materials of equal focus to that of the student materials • Intended to increase content and pedagogical knowledge • Intended to maximize fidelity • Iterative design with field-testing

2. Fidelity in a Development Project We ask if it feasible: • for teachers of various expertise levels and contexts (geographic, demographic) to teach the program with sufficient fidelity? • If not, what professional development is necessary? • for all program features to be taught with sufficient fidelity, e.g., • BSCS 5Es (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate) • Within each, e.g., • Collaborative Learning • Metacognition • Sense-Making

3. Fidelity in Efficacy Trials • Issue of statistical conclusion validity – Unreliability of Treatment Implementation (Shadish et al., 2002) • Measure of achieved relative treatment strength (Hulleman and Cordray, 2009) • Useful for secondary, exploratory analyses (e.g., treatment on the treated) • In our efficacy trial, we had external consultants observe (live) and measure fidelity (8 times/yr) following training and calibration at BSCS • Ideally observers would be blind to treatment condition but we couldn’t ensure this in our study of curriculum materials • Indirect (correlated) measures of fidelity – RTOP (Sawada et al., 2002) allows for comparisons across studies