Using Implementation Science to Advance Rural Education Research (Poster 5)

• In Event: Mapping the Landscape of Improvement Research: Representing Diverse Approaches Using a Common Grammar

Abstract

Purpose

Our poster’s purpose is to describe the Active Implementation Frameworks (AIFs) and demonstrate their use as an improvement approach to advance rural education research.

Perspective

Implementation science refers to the study of strategies that facilitate the uptake of evidence and research into regular use (Glasgow et al., 2013). Fixen and colleagues (2005) conducted a synthesis of findings from early implementation research to develop the AIFs. The AIFs posit that improved outcomes are driven by three mechanisms: effective practices, effective implementation, and enabling contexts (Fixen et al., 2010). Effective practices highlights the importance of selecting evidence-based innovations or those shown to be effective locally (Author, 2016). Effective implementation illuminates the value of providing implementation support to those responsible for delivering the innovations. Finally, enabling contexts stresses the importance of local policies, routines, and assets that create change opportunities. Context is especially critical in rural school districts, where recent reform efforts to improve educational outcomes have largely failed to impact educational and life trajectories (Showalter et al., 2023). To enact these mechanisms, diverse teams use the AIFs to identify usable innovations, co-design and deliver implementation drivers, and use improvement cycles to adapt implementation drivers and innovations to local context (Fixen & Blase, 2020).

Modes of Inquiry

We showcase our efforts to use the AIFs in collaboration with our Wisconsin and North Carolina partners to establish a research and development center aimed at improving early literacy outcomes in rural settings.


Data Sources

We plan to draw on the following data sources:

Student outcome measures: school readiness and early literacy (DIBELS, PALS)

System and implementation measures: implementation capacity (District Capacity Assessment, Ward et al., 2018), implementation fidelity of practices (Observations), team’s heath and functioning (RPP Effectiveness and Health Toolkit, Henrich et al., 2023), implementer’s beliefs of acceptability, feasibility, and appropriateness of implementation drivers (AIFM scales, Weiner et al., 2010), and implementer’s beliefs and attitudes for EBPs (EBP Beliefs Scale, Melnyk et al., 2008).

Focus groups and interviews were conducted to make meaning of quantitative results.


Findings

Using the AIFs, we designed the Center’s work:

Building the foundational conditions: Community-based participatory design to co-design, deliver, and improve implementation with our partners in rural communities.

Mapping the improvement space: Landscape analysis and exploratory sequential mixed-methods to identify practices in “bright-spot” rural districts that are beating the odds.

Iterating and Measuring: Rapid prototyping, iterative testing, and impact analysis to explore the effects associated with provision of co-designed implementation supports.

Spreading and sustaining improvement: A series of interconnected leadership, capacity-building, and outreach activities to support dissemination and use of learnings.


Significance

Building the know-how to implement EBPs and adapt them to context is as important as the identification of EBPs is to improving outcomes (Author, 2022). Our Center’s design highlights how using AIFs can help to build and study that know-how to successfully use innovations in rural education. Understanding the promise of implementation research may be particularly important in rural communities where average effects mask wide variation in outcomes and access to educational opportunities.

Authors

• Caryn Sabourin Ward, RTI International

• Lora A. Cohen-Vogel, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill