Scaling Up Research-based Educational Practices

Scaling up innovations whose use has resulted in improvements in teaching and learning has been a growing field in educational research and practice in recent decades. Interest has two main spurs: the evident gap between educational research findings and their take-up and use to improve teaching and learning, and the persistent challenges of ensuring high levels of educational achievement for all. Scaling up was originally conceived in terms of numbers: the spread of proven practice from the original sites to many schools, or across a whole system. Scaling up innovation began with testing research-based designs and evaluating their efficacy, followed by implementation. Successful implementation of research-based practices meant attention to fidelity, and thus to constructing materials, guides, and processes, and to providing support from the original designers. In turn this meant more attention to understanding variations in how well schools implemented an intervention: was it due to school-level factors, district- or system-level factors, the nature of the student population, or factors associated with the intervention? There are some enduring programs or interventions that fit this model, some based on whole-school reform, some on particular curriculum areas or approaches. Other interventions have been less successful. More recently, scaling-up work has also included research-educator-administrator partnerships and networks, using improvement design cycles, learning from variability, and expecting that innovations will evolve and be adapted in different contexts, rather than replicated. There has also been increasing attention paid in this branch of scaling-up work to building in ongoing attention to evidence of efficacy, and plan-do-study-review cycles into professional identity and practice, in order to strengthen teacher, network, and school and administration capability, as well as agency, ownership, and community. Most countries have evaluations of innovative programs or approaches showing gains for teaching and learning that failed to take hold or endure. Often this is because of structural reasons beyond the agency or control of those involved, due to changes of government or system decision makers. Other key obstacles are evident in the lack of change in the constraints around how teachers and schools can work. These constraints include competing calls on time, rigid accountabilities and ways resources can be used, expectations of immediate large gains, and mismatched measures of student achievement. There are too many such evaluations for this bibliography to cover. However, key articles that discuss these core challenges to scaling up well-founded research-based practices are included.