Designing for sustained adoption: A model of developing educational innovations for successful propagation

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Preparing and Supporting University Physics Educators.] The physics education research community has produced a wealth of knowledge about effective teaching and learning of college level physics. Based on this knowledge, many research-proven instructional strategies and teaching materials have been developed and are currently available to instructors. Unfortunately, these intensive research and development activities have failed to influence the teaching practices of many physics instructors. This paper describes interim results of a larger study to develop a model of designing materials for successful propagation. The larger study includes three phases, the first two of which are reported here. The goal of the first phase was to characterize typical propagation practices of education developers, using data from a survey of 1284 National Science Foundation (NSF) principal investigators and focus group data from eight disciplinary groups of NSF program directors. The goal of the second phase was to develop an understanding of successful practice by studying three instructional strategies that have been well propagated. The result of the first two phases is a tentative model of designing for successful propagation, which will be further validated in the third phase through purposeful sampling of additional well-propagated instructional strategies along with typical education development projects. We found that interaction with potential adopters was one of the key missing ingredients in typical education development activities. Education developers often develop a polished product before getting feedback, rely on mass-market communication channels for dissemination, and do not plan for supporting adopters during implementation. The tentative model resulting from this study identifies three key propagation activities: interactive development, interactive dissemination, and support of adopters. Interactive development uses significant feedback from potential adopters to develop a strong product suitable for use in many settings. Interactive dissemination uses personal interactions to reach and motivate potential users. Support of adopters is missing from typical propagation practice and is important to reduce the burden of implementation and increases the likelihood of successful adoption.

This article appears in the following collection:

Figure 1

Overview of the larger study, carried out over five years. This paper describes phases 1 and 2, which have resulted in a tentative model of educational development for successful propagation.

Figure 2

Our approach is to capture the actions and beliefs present in interview and document data, describe what is going on through codes, organize those codes into descriptive categories, use propositions to interpret the categories, and finally combine the propositions to create a model.

Figure 3

Survey questions analyzed, adapted from Khatri et al. 2012 [23].

Figure 4

Overview of coding system hierarchy, with the four main categories on top and frequently mentioned codes associated with each category.

Figure 5

Tentative model of designing for successful propagation resulting from phases 1 and 2 of this study. The model has three core propagation activities to be undertaken by the project team: interactive development, interactive dissemination, and support of adopters. The model emphasizes both the roles of three feedback loops that interconnect different stages and the role of funding for each phase.