| The last two decades have seen a tremendous growth in the amount of elementary school mathematics curricular materials available to teachers. In classrooms throughout the country, young, mid-career, and older teachers are faced with the challenges of teaching from curricular materials that sometimes bear little resemblance to what these teachers might have used in the past. In these situations, teachers make decisions that affect how they implement these curricular materials in the classroom. Some will choose to implement the program exactly as recommended by the publisher; others will choose a different approach. Either way, classroom instruction and student learning is affected. To date, there is insufficient understanding of how teachers implement these new mathematics materials in classrooms.; The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a multi-dimensional self-report instrument that measures the fidelity with which elementary teachers implement a Standards-based mathematics program. This instrument, the Feeney Survey of Implementation Fidelity, contains six components consisting of a total of 25 items using a Likert-type scale. The survey was administered to 179 teachers in three different districts (urban, suburban, and ex-urban).; Evidence of the validity of the results of the instrument was provided using several approaches. Content validity evidence was established through external expert review. Response/scoring processes validity evidence was provided through interviews and direct observation. Internal structure validity evidence was provided through principal components analysis using the eigenvalue-one criterion to extract six independent factors. Varimax rotation of the factors produced an interpretable, six-component internal structure. Cross-validation evidence of the internal structure was provided through a random split of a larger data set (N = 458) into two smaller data sets. Cronbach's alpha reliability coefficients provided evidence of the internal consistency of the six components of the survey instrument.; The validity and reliability evidence produced from the scores on the Feeney Survey of Implementation Fidelity have validated the meaningfulness of the instrument constructs. This makes the instrument useful for investigating how elementary school teachers implement a Standards -based mathematics program. |
