ATLAST’s approach to measuring student opportunity to learn was situated in a theory of teaching for understanding.\u00a0 Consistent with this theory, we adopted a variation of the learning cycle as the basis for instrument development.\u00a0 The cycle includes the following phases of instruction:<\/p>\n
To construct a framework for\u00a0performing\u00a0analyses of enacted curricula, we\u00a0identified phenomena that support students’ development of the targeted content for each sub-idea in the three content areas.\u00a0 The content areas differ in the extent to which associated phenomena are directly observable.\u00a0 To accommodate these differences, we distinguished between evidentiary phenomena and primary phenomena.<\/p>\n
Evidentiary phenomena are observable<\/em>, naturally occurring events that provide evidence for the primary <\/strong>phenomena (e.g., bubbles appear on the leaves of a plant submerged in water (observable), providing evidence that plants produce oxygen during photosynthesis<\/strong> (not observable)).<\/p>\n Initial efforts to\u00a0construct a tool for rating opportunity to learn using instructional logs resulted in a multi-faceted matrix<\/a>.\u00a0 This approach was intended to take into account both what content was included in instruction and how students were engaged with the content.\u00a0 Although the matrix captured several important aspects of instruction, reliability among raters was unacceptably low.\u00a0 In addition, rating all of the instructional logs for a unit required a great deal of rater time.<\/p>\n