Everyone is talking about it, but no one is doing it: Is implementation research informing adaptation towards scale?

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Learning in groups, learning in loops: How to start using data for development in implementation research

Proposal

With growing evidence of what works in education, governments and their partners strive to scale proven solutions to educational challenges. While implementation research (IR) to adapt solutions holds promise for testing what works, where and for whom, its use in education is limited. This paper presents insights on IR gathered via interviews with 63 international education stakeholders (Dowd, 2024). These experts work on education research from their positions in government, academia, think tanks, local and international non-governmental organizations, multi- and bi-laterals and foundations.

Some stakeholders lack IR examples, showing that it’s rarely used; while others have examples that reveal three different modes of IR based on responsiveness, timeliness, and collaboration. Some IR responds to impact evaluation results, some responds to monitoring data and some is planned for in continuous feedback loops. These three modes are dominated by response to impact evaluations, not surprising given the larger funding available for such effectiveness research in recent years. This paper frames the three other papers whose efforts to plan for feedback loops are underway.

The interviewed stakeholders also reveal creativity in generating the needed space, time, resources and trust to use IR in collaborative partnerships to drive evidence-based contextualization and iteration in education. Those involved in IR in education speak to the primacy of government involvement, trust and curiosity in collaborative efforts. They also share common challenges to be tackled in generating and using evidence to continually improve education efforts.

This study finds ten common themes and their implications offer ideas for starting from different places, designing flexible IR funds and thinking ahead and across stakeholders about how evidence will be used. Attention to relationships, trust and local research priorities and actors offers credibility for progress. These findings are applied in the uBoraBora fund in which the remaining three papers participate.

The findings suggest the need to refocus investment from research on effectiveness to research on implementation – or at least to better combine the two. They call for attention to ministry demand, donor flexibility, researcher transparency and implementer adaptability in a strategy of progressive refinement rather than aiming to arrive at a single, scalable, verified model. This requires a shift from verifying what works to continuously adapting it; from avoiding policy failure to assuming it will happen and setting up to learn from it and adapt and iterate based upon it.

This paper offers a frame to learn about three organizations engaged in using data to more intensively attend to and improve implementation to ensure learning for all. Their efforts to do more IR and share results support a move to making ongoing, co-designed IR the norm rather than the exception on the pathway to scale. Greater IR incidence and experience can help us learn our way to scale with greater efficiency and equity.

Author

• Amy Jo Dowd, NA