Success Stories:   Front-End Analysis

Background

The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) has recently experienced significant growth in the number of schools participating in their America's Choice comprehensive school reform program growing from a few schools in 1996 to 650 schools in 2002. This high rate of growth is expected to continue and may well even increase as a result of the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." The program's leadership team was concerned as to whether the program approaches, content creation, delivery methods and training processes that had worked in the early years of America's Choice could continue to offer the levels of efficiency or effectiveness that would be required to sustain the much larger organization that America's Choice might become.

Purpose

NCEE desired to take a fresh look at the efficacy of central features in its program to recommend improvements in the training, materials and support that America's Choice provides its clients who must build their capacity to successfully implement the America's Choice School Design Model.

Analytical Process

An analysis process was designed to meet the goals of the leadership team defined as follows:

 
 
  		• Examine the program to determine scalability and the effectiveness of its content, design, and delivery.
  		• Identify and understand the audience and determine the suitability of the content to those audiences.
  		• Determine the critical factors for successful implementation of the School Design program.
  		• Determine how to ensure quality and consistency with training and implementation support among the six regional offices.
  		• Determine the role of technology relative to scalability, consistency, quality, maintenance of program integrity, capability of increasing the amount of training, ease of implementation, rapid deployment, post training support and collaboration.
  		• Examine the use of technology for collaboration between headquarters and regional offices; between the regional offices themselves and with their clients; and among client schools.
  		• Identify the content, instructional design, and implementation changes that are necessary to achieve the goals.
  		• Determine the impact of the recommended changes to the current program and analyze how best to implement the changes.

    In order to meet these objectives, Knowledge Design Group developed a process to gather input from a variety of constituents, analyze the data received, research possible solutions and develop recommendations.

    Input was gathered through several techniques which are detailed below.

     
     
  		• Onsite structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with client school teachers, program coaches and principals, and with America's Choice personnel.
  		• Questionnaires were completed by both client school and America's Choice personnel.
  		• Observations were conducted during training sessions.
  		• The audience characteristics, the course development process and the facilitator preparation process were reviewed through interviews and questionnaires.
  		• Curriculum outlines were reviewed and analyzed.
  		• A survey of the Information Technology capabilities of both the clients and America's Choice staff was conducted.

    The resulting data was analyzed and research was conducted to explore possible learning solution alternatives.

    Deliverables

    The analysis activities culminated in the creation of a report that detailed seven deliverables.

     
     
    1. 
    		 The identification of the critical success factors for implementation of the school design program.
    2. 
    		 The suitability of the current course content and recommended changes.
    3. 
    		 The state of technology within NCEE and the client schools and recommendations for the use of e-learning within the America's Choice training program.
    4. 
    		 A proposed timeline for implementation of the recommendations.
    5. 
    		 Recommendations for ongoing program support.
    6. 
    		 Organizational development recommendations.
    7. 
    		 Estimated costs for recommendations, including risks and opportunities for each.

    Benefits

     
     
  		• America's Choice learned that the client perception of their materials and programs is consistently positive.
  		• America's Choice has a roadmap for process improvement that is integrated into their strategic planning process.
  		• Quantitative data is now available to support the implementation of an e-learning enterprise platform.
  		• A design plan has been built for integrating e-learning into their current instructor-led training approach.