Instructional Alignment in Nepal Using the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum

The final output of the coding process is a dataset of topic/subtopic codes and rates of cognitive demand levels that enables the quantitative analysis of the content and alignment across instructional components. [...] They are then asked for each topic/subtopic area covered, to give an approximate estimate in terms of the amount of time spent in that content area giving the relative level of emphasis.3 This process produces a similar dataset as the expert panel dataset, including the topics and subtopics covered, the level of cognitive demand expected for each, and the level of emphasis given to each topic/cogn. [...] The COVID-19 pandemic affected the implementation of the IC, and as such, at the time of the study, the curriculum had only been partially rolled out to Grade 1 teachers. [...] The first set of outputs of the SEC analysis are three-dimensional content maps with topics or subtopics on the Y-axis,6 levels of cognitive demand on the X-axis, and percent of total coverage (relative emphasis) on the Z-axis (Smithson, 2015). [...] Student performance data was collected for Grades 2 and 3 as a baseline before the roll-out of the new IC, and helps answer the question: “To what extent does the IC respond to student needs?” Figure 8 shows a comparison of the IC with the CB-EGRA and associated student performance for Grade 2 students.