TY - JOUR
T1 - Accommodating Change
T2 - Relating Fidelity of Implementation to Program Fit in Educational Reforms
AU - Anderson, Eleanor R.
N1 - Funding Information:
Many thanks to Jonathan Guryan and Jeannette Colyvas for their extensive support and assistance throughout the development of this manuscript. Thank you as well to Jim Spillane, Cynthia Coburn, and four anonymous reviewers who each provided feedback on earlier drafts. Earlier formulations of this paper were also presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association and the Structuring Work in and around Organizations Workshop. This research was supported in part by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305B080027 to Northwestern University. The opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. Finally, thanks to Deborah Ball, David Cohen, and Brian Rowan, who made data from the Study for Instructional Improvement publicly available, making these analyses possible.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, © 2017 AERA.
PY - 2017/12/1
Y1 - 2017/12/1
N2 - Asking practitioners to make larger changes to their practice is often thought to lead to lower fidelity of implementation. However, salient differences between ambitious new reforms and teachers’ existing practices may also facilitate processes of conceptual change and correspondingly increase fidelity of implementation. I use survey data on the implementation of two Comprehensive School Reform programs to investigate this puzzle, presenting a series of descriptive multivariate regressions that—contrary to conventional wisdom—predominantly support a positive association between larger changes and higher fidelity. I also address alternative explanations for this finding and discuss the conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses, implications for future research, and potential utility for practice of each interpretation.
AB - Asking practitioners to make larger changes to their practice is often thought to lead to lower fidelity of implementation. However, salient differences between ambitious new reforms and teachers’ existing practices may also facilitate processes of conceptual change and correspondingly increase fidelity of implementation. I use survey data on the implementation of two Comprehensive School Reform programs to investigate this puzzle, presenting a series of descriptive multivariate regressions that—contrary to conventional wisdom—predominantly support a positive association between larger changes and higher fidelity. I also address alternative explanations for this finding and discuss the conceptual and empirical strengths and weaknesses, implications for future research, and potential utility for practice of each interpretation.
KW - comprehensive school reform
KW - conceptual change
KW - fidelity of implementation
KW - magnitude of change
KW - organizational change
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U2 - 10.3102/0002831217718164
DO - 10.3102/0002831217718164
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85036566156
VL - 54
SP - 1288
EP - 1315
JO - American Educational Research Journal
JF - American Educational Research Journal
SN - 0002-8312
IS - 6
ER -