Building Capacity for Determining the Content Alignment and Instructional Quality of K-12 NSDL Resources

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NSDL Pathways personnel are being trained to determine the content alignment and instructional quality of their K-12 resources using the criteria developed at AAAS Project 2061. The training workshops cover the essentials of the processes for alignment and evaluation of a resource's instructional quality as a measure of the likelihood that student learning is promoted when the resource is used as designed.Resources that are aligned with content standards and provide students with varied phenomena are essential to the understanding of key science ideas. K-12 NSDL resources vary greatly in the grain size and quality of their alignment to standards. Coupled with the existence of little information about the resources' instructional quality, this creates difficulty for educators trying to locate the most effective resources. The analysis procedure that the NSDL Pathways personnel are being trained to use is based on a substantial corpus of research and was developed over many years in consultation with hundreds of K-12 teachers, materials developers, scientists, teacher educators, and cognitive researchers. By applying analysis criteria derived from the best available research on learning and teaching, the project is improving the cataloging of educational digital resources enabling improved selection for classroom use to be made with respect to content alignment and instructional quality.