January 14, 2015
Fidelity of Implementation
Fidelity of implementation (FOI) refers to the degree to which an innovation, program, or practice is implemented as intended. Fidelity assessments answer the question, “Did we do what we said we would do?”
The broader context and challenge for teacher education institutions implementing programmatic or evaluation interventions is to begin to look at the fidelity of implementation to ensure that the interventions support candidate success. Additionally, it is critical that faculty members are doing their part moving from a normed implementation of negotiated accountability to fidelity of understanding the context, compliance, and competence related to each intervention to limit the possibility of tainting the results. Key faculty members engaged in the Pirate CODE implementation are leading the effort to measure and improve the FOI of the innovations. The goal is create a model of FOI that can be applied to educational innovations in the higher education setting.
In July 2014, faculty members attended a full-day workshop on developing, measuring and improving program fidelity. The workshop was facilitated by Dr. Karen Blasé of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN). The initial challenge was to develop the measures needed to assess the current level of FOI for ISLES and the edTPA. These measures include the context (the prerequisites that must be in place for a program or practice to operate), compliance (the extent to which the practitioner uses the core intervention components prescribed by the evidence-based program or practice), and competence (the level of skill shown by the therapist in using the core intervention components as prescribed while delivering the treatment).
In addition to measuring the levels of FOI for ISLES and the edTPA, the faculty members are developing a research agenda to identify the interventions that need to occur to enhance FOI of education innovations. The research agenda will be presented at the 2015 AACTE conference.
#ECU_CAEPisComing