Conducting Research on Scaling the Impact of Education Innovations Around the World

• In Event: Investigating Global Efforts to Scale the Impact of Educational Innovations

Abstract

This paper describes a multi-national, multi-year project studying the work of researchers and educational implementers scaling educational innovations in low-income countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of Central Asia. This project—called Research on Scaling the Impact of Education Innovations Around the World (or ROSIE)—is a four-year partnership between the Brookings Institution and the Global Partnership for Education.

The ROSIE project supports and studies twelve international teams of education researchers and implementers, each of whom is engaged in scaling the impact of an innovative education reform in one or more countries. Examples include a team focused on expanding a teaching approach in Nigeria and Zambia that groups children in grades three-to-five not by age but by learning level—and provides accompanying teacher professional development on how to focus learning on ability levels, not grade levels. Or a team that is putting cutting-edge teacher development courses online and making them available to teachers in rural parts of Ghana and Uzbekistan. Or a team that is implementing a digital learning tool that teaches literacy in the home in Honduras and Nicaragua and connects that home experience (and participating caregivers and community actors) to local schools. All twelve of these teams have a proven education innovation and are hard at work to both scale and study the implementation of their innovation. They have all received funding from various international or bilateral development agencies and ROSIE is charged with supporting their work, offering technical assistance when relevant, and studying their experience.

Our study collects data on the teams’ ongoing work and analyzes the data in order to pursue cross-case analyses in the multiple countries and uncover patterns and similarities as well as differences among the groups’ work. We adopted a design-based educational-research structure (DBER): a methodology that (1) focuses on extracting findings useful to the very participants of the research as much as to general audiences, (2) is collaborative and participatory and therefore views study participants as fellow researchers, and (3) is comprised of iterative cycles of data collection-analysis-sharing over multiple years (we are currently in year two). Our research question is, How can educational approaches be designed, adapted, and scaled to improve education access and quality? Our participant-collaborators submit rounds of data every three months and we code and analyze the data by way of conceptual frameworks coming from scaling science, reform implementation, teaching and learning research, interpretivist ethnography, ecological research, and critical theory.

Adjacent to this study of the twelve teams, ROSIE is also pursuing a complementary study in which we interview national and regional government decision-makers in 35 low-income countries on the topic of how they engage in the process of identifying and adopting innovations to support at scale. Our presentation will describe both studies of this ROSIE project and share findings and challenges as we continue to research and support education reform work in low-income countries around the world.

Author

• Brad Olsen, The Brookings Institution