Factors of Influence for Scaling Pedagogical Innovation

We will examine factors that influence the implementation of pedagogical innovation at scale, by devising a method that combines two theoretical perspectives. The first perspective of theory-driven evaluation comes from research on general social innovation.

Theory-driven evaluation articulates how to describe the structure and mechanisms of an innovation program so that it will be possible to examine its implementation in detail.

The second perspective, from the field of implementation research in education, concerns the conceptualization of scaling in a way that exceeds just looking at the number of participants, but also how a program survives when transferred from designers to practitioners.

We investigate a pedagogical program for teaching arithmetic in primary school, involving 14 Swedish municipalities and about 1,000 teachers. The program is relatively tightly controlled at all levels.

Both how the municipalities should organize the management of the project as well as detailed teaching models for the teachers. Still, there is room for adaptations to the local context. We will study in detail the pattern of these adaptations.

The affordances and constraints of these adaptations in relation to scaling will be examined using principles from theory-driven evaluation with the aim of finding factors that influence the scaling of the implementation.