The ambitious goals of standards-based reform call for both technical and adaptive leadership to address problems of practice involving the technical and adaptive alignment of teachers' instruction to the standards. Thus, standards-aligned curriculum implementation necessitates both types of strategies; otherwise, adaptive challenges will persist.…

As the standards movement continues into its third decade, there remains a need for alignment methodologies that can be broadly applied to study instruction and policy. This article reports on a series of development efforts meant to revise the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) surveys and methods to study the implementation of new college- and…

As the standards movement continues into its third decade, there remains a need for alignment methodologies that can be broadly applied to study instruction and policy. This article reports on a series of development efforts meant to revise the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) surveys and methods to study the implementation of new college- and…

Research has identified a number of problems limiting the implementation of content standards in the classroom. Curriculum materials may be among the most important influences on teachers' instruction. As new standards roll out, there is skepticism about the alignment of "Common Core--aligned" curriculum materials to the standards. This…

With the recent adoption of the Common Core standards in many states, there is a need for quality information about textbook alignment to standards. While there are many existing content analysis procedures, these generally have little, if any, validity or reliability evidence. One exception is the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), which has…

An essential component in school accountability efforts is for assessments to be well-aligned with the standards or curriculum they are intended to measure. However, relatively little prior research has explored methods to determine statistical significance of alignment or misalignment. This study explores analyses of alignment as a special case…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives state boards of education a tremendous opportunity to revamp education policy. The federal government will have dramatically reduced influence over issues related to standards and accountability systems. States will have increased freedom to revise state standards and assessment systems, change the…

The alignment among standards, assessments, and teachers' instruction is an essential element of standards-based educational reforms. The Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) is the only common tool that can be used to measure the alignment among all three of these sources (Martone & Sireci, 2009). Prior SEC alignment work has been limited by…

Coherence is the core principle underlying standards-based educational reforms. Assessments aligned with content standards are designed to guide instruction and raise achievement. The authors investigate the coherence of standards-based reform's key instruments using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum. Analyzing 138 standards-assessment pairs…

We describe an innovative automated test construction algorithm for building aligned achievement tests. By incorporating the algorithm into the test construction process, along with other test construction procedures for building reliable and unbiased assessments, the result is much more valid tests than result from current test construction…

Recent years have seen the convergence of two major policy streams in U.S. K-12 education: standards/accountability and teacher quality reforms. Work in these areas has led to the creation of multiple measures of teacher quality, including measures of their instructional alignment to standards/assessments, observational and student survey measures…

States vary greatly in their implementation of standards-based accountability under No Child Left Behind, yet little evidence is available to guide policymakers on what attributes of state policy advance more tightly aligned instruction. This study uses survey data and content analyses from the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum to describe elements of…

Recent years have seen increased attention to the high school-college transition. Students are enrolling in college in record numbers, yet they are also taking increasing numbers of remedial courses. How to measure and report on academic readiness for college is an important policy issue receiving attention from the National Assessment Governing…

Research over the past two decades has shown the alignment of teachers’ instruction with state standards is generally weak. Proposing that alignment is a useful measure of teachers' curricular knowledge (Shulman, 1986), this study uses a large database of teacher reports of their content coverage to understand the relationship of teacher…

International comparisons have highlighted that the U.S. mathematics curriculum, both in terms of curriculum influences (e.g., textbooks, standards) and actual instruction, is broad and shallow. Standards-based reform is explicitly designed to improve coherence and reduce redundancy across grades. This article evaluates the redundancy of…