| The purpose of this study was to investigate the operational changes in teachers' levels of use of an innovative early childhood mathematics curriculum, Mathematics Their Way (MTW), after thirty hours of professional development training was provided to assist in the implementation of the innovation. The instrument used to measure the change was the Level of Use (LoU) focused interview dimension of the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM).; The research design employed in this study was a one-group pretest-posttest design adapted to a pre-implementation focused interview and post-implementation focused interview. Thirty-one percent of the participants participating in the summer, 1996 professional development training for MTW were interviewed to establish what they were doing or not doing regarding their implementation of MTW.; The results indicated that 60% of the participants who were not using MTW before the training increased their LoU to the Mechanical users' level and 10% increased to the Routine users level after training in MTW and several months of implementation of MTW. The Mechanical users' level was defined by Hall and Hord (1987) as a state in which the teacher is still struggling with the day-to-day management and logistics of implementing the innovation and changes in use are made more to assist the user than to meet the needs of the students. Thirty percent of the participants who attempted to use MTW prior to the training indicated a level of use at the Routine users' level of use after the training. Routine users, according to Hall and Hord (1987), have stabilized in their use but are making little or no attempt to change or improve the use of the innovation or its consequences. These results were consistent with the findings of the developers of the LoU dimension of CBAM that subjects who are non-users of an innovation or beginning users will cluster in the mechanical and routine user levels after initial intervention has taken place. |
