A Framework for Incorporating Intervention Fidelity in Educational Evaluation Studies

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is considered by many researchers to be the gold standard for rigorously evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of interventions (IES, 2014). While the RCT is a crucial tool for understanding the average causal impact of an educational intervention, it is less useful for understanding the processes by which an intervention impacts outcomes. In fact, many have described the information about causal effects provided by randomized experiments as a “black box” (Cook, 2003; Imai et al., 2011). In order to open this black box there is growing interest in collecting data on intervention fidelity to inform our understanding of how, and under what conditions, interventions work (Bloom, 2005).