Evaluation Models Part I: Stake’s Congruence-Contingency Model

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Evaluation models are used in curriculum as a process for assessing the appropriateness of a curriculum for a context. As with approaches to curriculum evaluation, evaluation models can be divided into scientific and humanistic models. For the next few post, we will look at scientific models of curriculum evaluation. Our first example is Robert Stake’s Congruence-Contingency Model.

Congruence-Contingency Model

Stake’s model of curriculum evaluation is more than just an evaluation process. Stake’s model also looks at the development of the curriculum. When using this model, it is necessary to compare the developed curriculum with what actually happens in the classroom.

There are six key terms, broken down into two groups of three, that we need to know in order to understand Stake’s model and they are as follows.

Development Stage

  • Potential prerequisites
  • Potential Curriculum
  • Potential results

Evaluation Stage

  • Prerequisites applied in context
  • Evaluation of operational curriculum
  • Actual results

Prerequisites

The prerequisites is another way of saying “before” or the state of the context before the intervention of teaching. This includes student’s attitude, motivation, prior academic performance, teacher characteristics, and more. In the development stage, the teachers need to identify what are some potential prerequisites that may impact learning. In the evaluation stage, the evaluators determine what prerequisites actually impact the curriculum. In other words, there is a comparison of what was anticipated and what actually was the case in terms of the prerequisites.

Potential & Operational Curriculum

Potential curriculum is the “dream” curriculum that is developed. It includes everything that the teachers want to do. The Operational curriculum is what was actually used. There is normally a discrepancy between the two as it is difficult to cover all of the material and use all of the activities. The evaluation will examine the difference between these two aspects of curriculum as another criterion for assessing the quality of the curriculum.

Potential vs. Actual Results

Potential results are what the teachers hope to see as a result of the use of the curriculum. Actual results are the real performance of the students. The difference between the potential or desired results and actual results is another indicator of the quality of the curriculum in Stake’s model.

Conclusion

Stake’s Model provides evaluators with an opportunity to compare the desired outcome with the actual outcome. The benefit of this is that it is the curriculum developers that set the criteria of evaluation. All the evaluators do is determine if the curriculum performed in a manner that is consistent with the ideas of the developers.