Design, construction, and Validation of a Curriculum and Academic Books Fidelity Questionnaire in the Field of Iranian Higher Education

The necessity of implementing the curriculum provided by the Iranian Ministry of Sciences, Research, and Technology is well-accepted and university instructors are presumed to stay loyal to it. One of the obstacles to conducting research on curriculum fidelity is the absence of a questionnaire compatible with the Iranian higher education context which can delineate the instructors' fidelity or infidelity to the prescribed curriculum and suggested academic books. Therefore, as an attempt to occupy this niche, using the findings of previous studies and the instructors' experiences of teaching, the first draft of the questionnaire was developed and revised several times to reach its final form. Then, 127 university instructors took the questionnaire, and the data on content validity, construct validity, face validity, and reliability were collected. Finally, a 27-item Likert-Scale questionnaire with five main factors was developed. The first factor dealt with the instructors, which included content knowledge and teaching ability, teaching experience, and personal issues. The second factor was about the curriculum, including the content quantity and quality. The third factor addressed the institute-related issues, examining university hardware, teaching performance evaluation, and university authorities' imposing personal opinions. Learner engagement (incompatibility of the content with students' knowledge and students' lack of interest in the material) was the fourth factor. The last factor was the effect of high-stakes tests on instructors' modification of the curriculum. The developed questionnaire can be used in the field of higher education to conduct future research on the adherence or non-adherence of university instructors to the curriculum.