Abstract
This paper builds on a range of traditions in educational research and design to argue, with empirical evidence, that constructing powerful instructional materials and approaches that work at scale requires a grounding in theory and a commitment to engineering practice, including rapid prototyping and multiple development cycles. Specifically, we claim that improving practice within a reasonable timescale requires replicable materials that integrate: (1) grounding in robust aspects of theory from prior research, (2) design tactics that combine these core ideas with a design team’s creativity, along with (3) flexibility in the draft materials that affords adaptation across contexts, (4) rapid prototyping, followed by iterative refinement cycles in increasingly realistic circumstances, with (5) feedback from each round of trials that is rich and detailed enough to inform revision, and (6) continued refinement on the basis of post-implementation feedback ‘from the field’. Examples of successful implementation are analysed and related to the various roles that research-based theory and programmatic research-based methods of development can and should play in the complex process of turning insights from research into improvements in practice. In contrast, we shall argue that materials which are written and published without the development processes (4) to (6)—still the great majority—lack research validity for use at scale.
Highlights
We begin with our title: Not just “implementation”
A team of design-researchers at the University of Utrecht led by Jan de Lange developed an approach to learning through a process of increasing abstraction of the mathematics used in modelling concrete real world situations. (Focused on the mathematics, this approach to mathematical modelling complements the more usual view of modelling, exemplified in the Mathematics Assessment Project (MAP)/Shell Centre lessons, as a way to solve real world problems.) The Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) work was developed over decades through a sequence of projects in the Netherlands and abroad, notably Mathematics in Context in the US—a rare example of international transfer of a curriculum
A multi-year R&D effort distilled the literature into five key dimensions of practice: the discipline (Are students engaged with and in important content and practices?), cognitive demand (Do activities involve students in productive struggle?), access (Are all the students actively involved in each phase of learning activities?), agency, ownership and identity (Does each student feel that they can contribute and that their mathematical reasoning is recognized as “belonging to them” and their fellow students?), and formative assessment (Is instruction structured to consistently reveal student thinking and provide formative feedback?)
Summary
This Special Issue is about implementability, which implies a focus on implementation It is widely believed, in the insight-focused research community and beyond, that turning an exciting new research result into products and processes that work well in practice is a straightforward process that might reasonably be called implementation (see e.g. Royal Society/British Academy 2018). Many other people made crucial Nobel-prize winning contributions along the In education, it is rare for a single research result to form the basis for a change in practice. The reader may like to note their roles in the examples that follow
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