Fidelity of Implementation: contextualizing measurement for sub-Saharan Africa education systems

• In Event: High Fidelity: The importance of efficiency and efficacy for early grade reading programs

Proposal

Fidelity of Implementation (FOI) generally refers to the level of adherence to a program’s procedures by its participants.
FOI was first developed in public health research in the 1970’s (O’Donnell, 2008) and has since been adopted by education research, but its measurement remains a challenge. It is suggested that in education, FOI is multi-dimensional (Dusenbury et al., 2003; Odom et al., 2010) and can be separated into two general criteria;
- fidelity to structure (duration of instruction); that the teachers are teaching according to the program components; for example, using the lesson plans and recommended activity duration.
- fidelity to process (quality of instruction); that the teachers are implementing the program using the appropriate techniques; for example, giving students adequate time to individually practice reading skills and receive feedback.
For early grade reading programs in sub-Saharan Africa, measurement of fidelity is typically achieved through a classroom observation instrument, conducted by a coach to give feedback and support to the teacher observed.
However, there is no published literature contextualizing fidelity of implementation for education in a sub-Saharan country context – fundamentally there is a lack of consideration to the local barriers that prevent humans from implementing programs with fidelity. The author will present the argument that the domestic FOI model is far from a perfect fit for sub-Saharan Africa education systems. A simple example that emphasizes this need to contextualize FOI is teacher absenteeism. This component of fidelity is relatively low in United States domestic education regarding teacher attendance; the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) reported average teacher classroom absenteeism of 6% across 40 school districts. Comparatively, The World Bank Institute (2018) reported for eight sub-Saharan countries that teacher absenteeism from the classroom was between 23% - 55% and teacher absenteeism from school between 13% - 45%. However, when we measure fidelity of implementation for early grade reading programs, we generally only measure fidelity of structure and process in the classroom limiting the measure of dosage to what is just observed in the classroom.

The author will present evidence that suggests that the current fidelity measures for early grade reading programs are not sufficiently defined such that they present either no measure of fidelity, a limited one or at times misleading measurement for programs, stakeholders and donors.
Carrol et. al. (2007) noted that without a FOI measure, program impact evaluations cannot inform why a program failed to produce impact or how to further enhance a program even if a program impact is established.

Finally, the author will discuss next-steps; dialogue with stakeholders and donors, and the need to measure fidelity during the impact evaluation of programs.

Author

• Simon King, RTI International