In 2005-2006 The Center for Children and Technology at the Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) conducted an independent evaluation to ascertain how effective WIDE World courses were in changing the way educators approached their work. Their study obtained very positive results. In the words of EDC evaluators:

"The study demonstrates that WIDE course participants learned to integrate theoretical concepts into their practical decisions as educators, and to link ongoing assessment to the understanding goal of a lesson." -- Harvard WIDE World Online Courses: Are Educators Putting Course Ideas into Practice? (Executive Summary), p. 1

The evaluators added,

"Linking theory and practice and [linking] learning goals with assessment are central issues in all professional development for educators. As goals, they are ambitious and difficult to achieve. The results of this study were statistically significant and provide positive proof of the efficacy of WIDE online courses in preparing educators to 'teach for understanding.'"-- ibid , p. 1

Theory to practice. As their primary focus, EDC studied 321 participants' ability to integrate theoretical concepts learned in their WIDE course into their practical decisions as educators. In the middle and at the end of the term, evaluators asked a series of in-depth questions about the nature of these applications and analyzed the responses in order to distinguish meaningful, robust instructional uses from more rote or superficial uses. They found a marked change between the two points in time. By end of course, the proportion that described what were judged as robust applications grew from 42% to 70%. Details are shown in the chart below.

Statistically, this change was very significant. A McNemar chi-square analysis shows that, assuming no underlying change actually occurred, the chances of seeing a change of this magnitude in a study of this size would be 1 in 300 trillion (X² = 62.37).*

Linking assessment with lesson goals. The study also addressed teachers' approaches to assessment of students. Scenarios presented both before and after the course asked participants to give rationales for using a particular assessment activity in light of the fictional lesson's goals. The evaluators analyzed each response to judge whether it showed an understanding of the way assessment would need to link with instruction. The fraction of teachers judged as showing such an understanding increased from 23% before the course to 55% at the end of the course, as the chart below shows.

This result, too, was statistically very significant using the McNemar test (X² = 14.29, p = .0002). Even with a small sample of 62, the change observed was large enough that, by chance alone, we would expect such a change to occur only about twice in 10,000 chances.*

EDC's full report will be made available through this site soon.