Refining Methods for Estimating Critical Values for an Alignment Index

Abstract

The alignment among standards, assessments, and teachers’ instruction is an essential element of standards-based educational reforms. The Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC) is the only common tool that can be used to measure the alignment among all three of these sources (Martone & Sireci, 2009). Prior SEC alignment work has been limited by not allowing for significance tests. A recent article (Fulmer, 2011) provided a first attempt to address this shortcoming of the SEC, but that work was limited in several ways. We extend Fulmer's simulation approach by accounting for important elements of the SEC procedures, including the proper framework size, number of standards and assessment points, number of raters, rater cell-splitting rates, and rater agreement results. The results indicate that inferences about relative alignment may be heavily influenced by features of the alignment procedures. Thus, our method should be broadly applied to future SEC alignment investigations.