Implementation Research

Abstract

Over many decades, educators have developed countless interventions and theories about how to create lasting change. Implementation research is the study of these efforts with a set of basic questions: What are we doing? Is it working? For whom? Where? When? How? And, Why? In other words, implementation research is an endeavor to understand if and how educational efforts are accomplishing their goals. This chapter describes the landscape of implementation research, tracing it back to its historical roots and connecting it to other fields with the aim of identifying common threads across diverse efforts. The authors survey where the field is today and highlight different perspectives on complex questions that have long troubled researchers. They outline some of the sticky issues ahead and make a case for shared conceptual clarity and clearly communicated and understood language that will help researchers understand how various bodies of implementation research work are related. The authors conclude by describing the opportunity presented to the education research community in this moment: to capitalize on and learn from historical and contemporary work in education and other fields, and to identify connections across theories and approaches and find ways to collectively move forward toward the shared goal of making education better.

Exploring critical components of an integrated STEM curriculum: an application of the innovation implementation framework

“…Consequently, the methods and findings of implementation studies often remain unpublished, shared only internally within a research project or with funding agencies. Over the years, researchers have offered a number of promising frameworks and approaches for investigating implementation (Century and Cassata, 2016;Ruiz-Primo, 2006); however, without specific examples of how these approaches work in practice, it may be difficult for research teams to select the most appropriate strategy for understanding how innovations unfold in schools and classrooms. By illustrating the application of the innovation implementation framework, we provide one example that may be instructive for other projects interested in the implementation of STEM innovations.…”

“…(p. 200). application of one promising framework, the innovation implementation framework (Century and Cassata, 2016;Century, Cassata, Rudnick, and Freeman, 2012;Century et al 2010). Specifically, the paper describes how this framework was applied to identify and describe the implementation of critical components of a new curriculum implemented in sixth-eighth-grade engineering classes.…”

“…With growing interest in curricular innovations in K-12 STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) settings, researchers have argued for the careful study of curriculum implementation (Fishman, Marx, Best, and Tal, 2003;Penuel, Fishman, Haugan Cheng, and Sabelli, 2011;Ruiz-Primo, 2006;Schneider, Krajcik, and Blumenfeld, 2005). Implementation research can serve a number of important purposes including documenting the degree to which an intervention is enacted as intended, allowing for more nuanced understandings of the outcomes of an intervention, informing refinements to curriculum and teacher professional development, and providing invaluable information about the conditions under which curricular innovations are likely to be successful when scaled to a broader population of teachers and students (Century and Cassata, 2016;Ruiz-Primo, 2006). As curricula introducing new approaches to STEM education are designed, there is a clear need to explore the degree to which implementation resembles what was envisioned by curriculum designers and to develop understandings of the various factors that may influence how a curricular innovation unfolds when used by students and teachers in actual classrooms (Cassata, Kim, and Century, 2015).…”

ASPiH standards for simulation-based education: process of consultation, design and implementation

“…Implementation research addresses the question of what ‘the innovation could and/or should be, the extent to which an innovation is feasible in particular settings, and its utility from the perspective of the end users’ (p 6) 27. By adopting an implementation science framework model18 to guide the design and development of the SBE standards framework, ASPiH believes that a robust standards document has been created.…”

Towards a research base for implementation strategies addressing mathematics teachers and facilitators

“…Describing the landscape of implementation research, Century and Cassata (2016) provided a working definition of implementation research as "systematic inquiry regarding innovations enacted in controlled settings or in ordinary practice, the factors that influence innovation enactment, and the relationships between innovations, influential factors, and outcomes" (p. 170). By 'innovations, ' Century and Cassata (2016) understand "programs, interventions, […], approaches, methods, strategies, […], that involve a change (e.g., in behavior or practice) for the individuals […] enacting them" (p. 170). In the context of PD for mathematics teachers, these interventions are often driven by results from mathematics education research.…”