Piloting the use of a digital assessment tool to strengthen innovators’ capacity to measure impact and push for scale

• In Event: ENJOY: A digital framework for assessing and promoting education practitioners’ evidence practices

Proposal

Problem
This organization identifies innovations in K-12 education that are impactful and scalable and selects 100 education innovators to evaluate their evidence practices, with the aim of enhancing their capacity to generate robust evidence for the design, implementation, and scale-up of programming in the diverse contexts in which they operate. Still, finding approaches and tools for promoting education organizations’ evidence uptake is a persistent challenge and this organization is working to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the operational competencies that these organizations possess for evidence uptake and how to best support the development of these competencies.

Research effort and forthcoming findings
Innovators included in the organization's 2025 cohort of innovators will participate in a pilot (expected for fall 2024) that will promote using ENJOY as a tool for organizational reflection on evidence practices and developing capacities related to evidence uptake. While implementing the pilot, this organization will assess: (1) how useable and valuable ENJOY is to innovators, (2) how innovators use the framework (e.g., self-reflection, organizational development, strategic thinking), and (3) if and how use varies by organization (e.g., by type of innovation, organizational size, location, or other characteristics). The organization will use this information and other insights from data collected through ENJOY to assist innovators in the adoption of robust and evidence-based frameworks to further develop their impact measurement practices and understand evidence needs related to taking innovations to scale. This organization will publish its findings for the innovator community and the public in early 2025.

Author

• Lasse Leponiemi, The HundrED Foundation