The effects of curriculum alignment on the mathematics achievement of third-grade students as measured by the Iowa Tests of basic skills: implications for educational administrators, 1998

This study involved over 4,000 third-grade students in a large suburban-emerging urban school district. The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of curriculum alignment on student achievement in mathematics as measured by the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) after one year of implementation in the school system. Curriculum alignment was the treatment or independent variable in the study. Its implementation was designed to address the problem identified in the study: the misalignment traditionally associated with classroom instruction and test items on standardized tests. This study presents a new model which depicts the four pronged historical roots of curriculum alignment in Effective Schools Research, measurement/standardized testing, curriculum, and learning theory. Within these four areas was found a common mantra: what is taught should be tested and what is tested should be what is taught. As simple as it may sound, this quest, originating from dissimilar camps, has struggled for legitimacy. The struggle to legitimize curriculum alignment is centered around the use of standardized tests to quantify accountability and short students. This study focused on those variables that serve as known predictors of poor performance on standardized tests: poverty, race, gender, and school size. Therefore, a key issue of this study was whether equity is a by-product for the alignment process. There were five research questions with parallel null hypotheses. The statistics used to examine these hypotheses were a t test and analysis of variance. Of the five hypotheses examined, one proved statistically significant. There was a statistically significant difference in the overall scores of matched third-grade students on the ITBS after one year of implementation of curriculum alignment with a NCE mean gain of 5.12 points in mathematics. According to the results, curriculum alignment appears to be an effective strategy in increasing student achievement with third graders in mathematics. It also appears to weaken the predictability of variables in student performance. For these reasons, the study concludes with a reference to curriculum alignment as a potential curriculum equalizer