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…

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…

In this article we present results of a comprehensive review of principal leadership assessment practices in the United States. Our analyses of both the general content and the usage of 65 instruments, 56 at the district level and 9 at the state level, provided an in-depth look at what and how districts and states evaluate principals. Using the…

State content standards are the backbone of the standards-based reform movement. Content standards provide teachers with a set of guidelines for what students are expected to know and be able to do, defining the intended curriculum. And although the current 50-state system of education gives each state the task of setting content standards, there…

This article examines the reliability of content analyses of state student achievement tests and state content standards. We use data from two states in three grades in mathematics and English language arts and reading to explore differences by state, content area, grade level, and document type. Using a generalizability framework, we find that…

Describes tools for measuring content of instruction, content of instructional materials, and alignment between them, reporting findings about use of these tools and possible additional uses for research and practice. Asserts that the validity of data produced using these tools is good. Sketches an agenda for future work to improve the quality and…

This chapter traces the development of, and evolving audiences for, a set of research tools developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the authors and others between 1989 and 2003, with roots extending back to work Porter and his colleagues at Michigan State conducted during the 1980s. Originally designed for use in investigating…

Research identifying potential influences on teachers' decisions about the content of instruction is described. Selected findings are presented in order to show the value of three approaches to analyzing content variation and its determinants in elementary school mathematics: (1) content analysis of the mathematics presented or advocated by…

Teachers' styles of textbook use were identified, and the overlap between content taught and textbook content in elementary school mathematics was studied for four teachers in four Michigan fourth grades. In each classroom there were important differences between text content and teacher's topic selection, content emphasis, and sequence of…

The educational accountability movement is changing the teacher's role in curriculum development from that of autonomous decision maker to agent of public school policy makers. To assess teacher reactions to factors influencing their autonomy, 75 teachers were exposed to pressures to change the content of fourth grade mathematics instruction in a…

Defining practical significance in program evaluations is a difficult measurement problem which can only be solved by an intimate familiarity with the measures on which effects are estimated and their content relationship to the program goals. Past attempts to provide general solutions to the size of effect problem have relied on standardized…