Guideline #11: Pay Attention to Implementation, But Not Too Much Attention
If you’re a K-12 educator or edtech provider, how can you make sure an edtech product will work in a specific school or community? Here’s one of 16 key guidelines for conducting and reporting edtech impact research that might help.
Edtech Research Guideline 11: Pay attention to implementation, but not too much attention
It is well understood that poor implementation can make an otherwise effective product perform poorly. An explicit model of implementation (as recommended in Guideline 1) specifies the set of conditions under which the provider predicts that the product will have the greatest effect. In experimental evaluations, this is often called “fidelity of implementation.” While it is important to ensure that product support systems are adequate to ensure fidelity, it is also important for the research to be designed around a sample that represents a typical and practical school system support and implementation pattern.
This guideline comes from the third section of the report, “Implementing the Design,” which focuses on actual implementation of the research design. The researcher may have devised an excellent design with clear research questions, sensitive measures, and clearly differentiated comparisons, but now he or she must make it happen.
A preview of other guidelines in this section include:
12. Work with researchers who can be objective and independent
For all audiences, the Guidelines not only provide approaches to practice, but also seek to advance the field by helping to identify an appropriate balance among the rigor, practicality, timeliness, and usefulness of evaluation studies of K-12 edtech products
This post is one in a series based on excerpts from the Edtech Guidelines published by Empirical Education and ETIN. For more information, you may access the full set of guidelines, here.
