Adherence

Adherence is the degree to which a person implementing an educational product presents to the learners the material and activities of the product in the way that the instructional designer intended.

Definition

When a person implements an educational product, their level of adherence to the intended design is defined as how closely to the expectations of the designer that they present the content and activities to the learners. Additionally, as the people who implement educational products are often educators, adherence is also the degree to which a teacher or facilitator performs the instructional tasks or roles that they personally are expected to do in the exercise as the educator.

Adherence is a primary component to the overall fidelity of implementation (FOI) of an educational product.

Additional Information

As many educational products rely on teachers and facilitators, it is important that the people who implement educational products adhere to the original plan and scope of designs. This is to ensure that the activities that teachers and learners are expected to perform will have the desired effect, based on the learning theories upon which the activities are designed. If the activities and content are not conducted as expected, then the expected outcomes may not as likely be achieved. This is due to a mismatch between the theory of learning that predicts the outcome, the designed activity that relies on the learning theory to predict how participants will learn from the activity, and how the activity was actually implemented in a real world setting.

Adherence can be measured in a few ways:

• How did the person implementing perform all of the expected tasks?
• How did the implementer require or present all of the activities to learners?
• How did the implementer establish adequate expectations as to how much learners should use or participate in the activity?
• Are there specific steps or procedures that an implementer is expected to follow when using the educational product?
• Are there specific instructional roles or actions (i.e., teaching tasks) that implementers are required to take in addition to ensuring the students perform the designed activities?
• Did each of the actions performed by the implementer (as measured in the points above) meet an established level of expectation by the designer?

Some educational products have little to no adherence concerns on part of a person implementing, as they are standalone products that operate on their own and are run the same way for each person (such as apps, videogames, or instructional course websites). These types of products do not use a mediator person in between the product and the learner, such as a teacher or facilitator. In such cases, a teacher may assign learners to use such products, but the actual product's operation is not changed by the teacher.

Tips and Tricks

• As a designer, consider how teachers or facilitators might use your product. You will want to consider the specific steps that you expect them to take when implementing it so that the product is used based on your goals and underlying theories that you use to produce the expected outcomes.
• How will you measure adherence to how your product is expected to be implemented? How will you have implementers report what they did, or how will you collect evidence of what they did? These are important aspects for a robust evaluation and knowing whether the product was used as expected.

Related Concepts

• Implementation
• Fidelity of Implementation
• Adaptation

Examples

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External Resources

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