Abstract: Fidelity of implementation measures the extent to which teachers or other implementors follow the ideal of an intervention. It serves as a measure of internal validity, a check of experimental manipulation, and can allow researchers to attribute success or failures to the intervention. It is a crucial element of an educational intervention, but many studies do not even mention it. With the Wesleyan Preschool Math Games, a set of research-based math games intended to be implemented by teachers through guided play, we have designed a series of measurements to test fidelity of implementation. Fidelity of implementation is a multidimensional concept and includes both structural fidelity (presence or absence of key intervention elements) and procedural fidelity (quality of the implementation). The first tool in our measurement battery is a pre-training questionnaire to assess teachers’ natural guidance style. This is valuable because teachers’ own pedagogical philosophies often predict their fidelity of implementation. The second tool in our measurement set will be a questionnaire to assess structural fidelity (e.g., which game did you play, how long was the play session). Our final instrument, a coding sheet for recorded classroom observations, serves as a check of experimental manipulation and a measurement of procedural fidelity (e.g., the total number of guided play interactions, how the teacher is interacting with the students, and who is initiating the math talk). By observing and coding the classrooms, we will better understand what is happening in the classroom across conditions and check that our study conditions are distinguishable from each other.
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