New school-based curricular interventions are fundamental in meeting the diverse needs of today’s students and improving student outcomes. Furthermore, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB; 2003) states that educators must use scientifically based teaching methods and strategies proven to be effective. In terms of curricular interventions, teachers are the primary implementation agents; therefore, the fidelity of such interventions depends on teacher adoption and delivery. The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers’ perceptions and justifications for changing critical intervention components and design principles of a research-based physical education curricular intervention. The data gathered in this study provide information about the variables that enhanced or constrained the effectiveness of a large-scale physical education intervention and teacher rationales for intervention adaptations within their context.
Method:
This qualitative research study examined the contextual components and implementation mechanisms contributing to the variation in teachers’ perspectives and methods of implementing the Science of Healthful Living (SHL) curriculum. Purposeful sampling (Patton, 2002) was used to select six middle school physical education teachers participating for the first time in the SHL project. The participating teachers taught the same 20-lesson unit from the SHL curriculum to their sixth-grade physical education students. During lesson implementation, I collected detailed observation field notes while comparing the lesson taught with the structured, scripted lesson that was provided in the intervention. After each lesson observation, I interviewed each teacher in their gymnasium asking unique questions based on the recently completed lesson observation.
Analysis/Results:
I analyzed the interview data through open, axial, and selective coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). The concepts identified during the open and axial coding process were organized into seven categories that spoke to reasons why teachers changed lesson structure, tasks, or task order. One core category, school contextual constraints, emerged within this examination of the curriculum implementation process. The results of this study suggested a multitude of preexisting contextual factors, such as lack of instructional time, space, and equipment, influence teachers’ fidelity to the intended curriculum.
Conclusions:
Intervention researchers should consider the nature of the contextual factors and whether they negatively impact the intervention when designing and revising school-based interventions. The current findings show potential for informing scholars of the merit and efficacy of the intervention on student outcomes. Thus, research on implementation fidelity has the potential to advance the quality of evidence-based program development and research.