homework

As we have been reading through Whatever It Takes, and Pyramid Response To Interventions a lot of information has been presented, and many arguments have been made for what Marzano (2003) calls A Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum. In other words, before we can begin to support students who are not meeting standard we need to have a solid core curriculum. The information that follows below is a synthesis of Marzano’s research found in What Works In Schools: Translating Research Into Action.

The first factor in having a high performing school is having a “guaranteed and viable curriculum.” This factor has the most impact on student achievement

Opportunity to Learn
Opportunity to learn (OTL) has the strongest relationship with student achievement of all school level factors identified by Marzano. It was first introduced to the research literature more than 30 years ago by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (Wilkins, 1997) when it became a component of the First, and then later, the Second International Mathematics Study (FIMS and SIMS respectively (Burestein, 1992; Husen, 1967a, 1967b). Apparently, OTL began as an afterthought in FIMS when researches became concerned that all students might not have had an equal opportunity to learn the items being used to assess their mathematics achievement (Wilkins, 1997). Consequently, various measures of OTL were devised and its relationship to mathematics achievement examined. The findings, which seem self-evident now, were somewhat of a surprise to the FIMS researchers as indicated by the following quote from a FIMS technical report (Husen, 1967b):

One of the factors which may influence scores on an achievement examination is whether or not student...

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...highest estimate of 69 percent as the upper boundary, we can conclude that of the 13,104 classroom hours theoretically available, only 9,042 hours are actually used for instruction. This comes to about 695.5 hours per year (9,042 hours ÷ 13 years of instruction) or about 3.9 hours per day (695.5 hours ÷ 180 days).

We now have a quantitative basis with which to answer the question: Can the 200 standards and 3.093 benchmarks be taught in the actual time available for instruction? The answer is a resounding no! Quite obviously, 15,465 hours of standards do not fit into 9,042 hours of instructional time. These calculations put a new face on the concept of viability. IN the current era of standards-driven curriculum, viability means ensuring that the articulated curriculum content for a given course or given grade level can be adequately addressed in the time available.