Addressing Educational Impact: Determining the Content Alignment and Instructional Quality of NSDL Resources

One of the purposes of the NSDL is to help educators implement standards-based reforms by providing high-quality materials for students and teachers at all levels (Wattenberg, 1998; Zia, 2001). NSDL Pathways are considered an important vehicle for making the digital library more useful because they connect professional society members and other existing users to the broader resources of the library (Howe, 2007). However, available resources have not necessarily been assigned to K-12 content standards and, for Pathways that do assign their resources to standards, there is considerable variability in the methods used to make decisions about alignment to standards. Furthermore, the mere presence of specific content in a resource--even if it is aligned to a content standard--does not ensure that the resource provides support for student learning of that content. Instructional quality judgments that are made by applying research-based criteria are currently not part of the cataloguing process in NSDL Pathways. Such criteria include whether the resources provide a variety of phenomena and representations to make abstract ideas plausible and intelligible (Kesidou & Roseman, 2002). They are important because they have been shown to positively predict student learning (Roth et al., 2009).

The lack of information about instructional quality in addition to content alignment makes it difficult for users to efficiently locate NSDL resources that are likely to promote student learning of standards. Supporting Pathways and collections developers in systematically analyzing resources for their alignment to learning goals and their instructional quality can help. We are on the first year of our NSDL project to work with the Pathways, the Resource Center, and Technical Network Services to build capacity for determining the content alignment and instructional quality of K-12 resources.