ABSTRACT
The funding of experimental research in education has grown four-fold over the last 15 years (IES, 2014; NIH, 2015). One by-product of this more focused funding model is a greater interest in implementation fidelity, generally defined as the extent to which an intervention is delivered as intended by end users in authentic education settings (ibid.). Increasingly, funders (ibid.), consumers, and conductors of education research identify fidelity as a necessary feature of well-designed experimental inquiry. However, there is a relative lack of practical guidance and even less systematic research on the nature of implementation fidelity in experimental settings (Cordray, 2007) or on strategies for combining fidelity-related data with other data types to evaluate a program’s impact in schools and other educational settings. This book takes a step toward building the knowledge base in this area.
