CK:P's assessment staff now consists of a post-doctoral fellow, a graduate student, and a secretary, all working under the direct supervision of one of the Principal Investigators. As the project expands in year three, we will add one graduate student and a part-time transcriber to this staff.
The assessment work in the project's first two years has two major foci. The first is formative evaluation. The second is study of the implementation process, with the goal of illuminating the organizational issues involved in attempting to launch, and then institutionalize, this ambitious educational change effort. Both of these streams of work will continue, although we hope to fund continuation of the former stream and the part of the latter that focuses on professional development through the Teacher Enhancement proposal mentioned earlier.
As actual implementation of classroom networking activities expands in scope and diversity we are well-positioned to shift our attention from the processes involved in the early stages of the change effort (initial professional development activities, strategies for building interest and enthusiasm, and approaches to overcoming logistical difficulties blocking implementation) to questions such as:
Work on these three questions will be conducted as a series of interconnected case studies, since the case study is a flexible approach to research appropriate in situations like CK:P in which one is studying a topic about which very little is known that can only be studied effectively in a natural environment [16,17]. Because of the marked diversity in the CK:P projects, the research plan provides flexibility in at least two respects. First, some cases will be investigated in much more depth than others, since some will assuredly be more complex and instructive than others. Second, provision will be made for gathering data made important by the unique characteristics of the various curriculum projects as well as gathering useful parallel data across projects.
These case studies will focus on the changes that occur in the classrooms of teachers involved with CK:P and the consequences of these changes. They will be designed in a way that facilitates cross-case comparison [18,17]. Going well beyond gathering basic descriptive information on the content, process, and consequences of change, the case studies will focus their attention on issues that existing theory and research suggest are especially important (e.g., school level leadership and acceptance, the clarity and complexity of the change, the degree to which the curriculum changes embody current knowledge about the importance of active learning, ``authentic'' tasks, etc. (See Fullan, 1989 [19], and Means et al. , 1993 [5] for reviews of some of the voluminous literature on these topics).
Both quantitative and qualitative data-gathering techniques will play a significant role in these case studies. For example, we will collect network usage statistics to monitor growth in network use and patterns of use by various categories of individuals (e.g., researchers, students, administrators). However, we will also continue and expand non-participant observation in classrooms. Similarly, we will conduct semi-structured interviews with students and teachers and will collect archival materials such as e-mail messages sent between teachers and the technical staff, curriculum materials, and proposals submitted as part of the RFP process.