“Scaling” a product in business typically means moving from a small number of “early adopters” to a larger number of “early majority” users. In the field of education, however, “scaling” an educational product or program has been more challenging to define.
Wide use of evidence-based educational innovations has the potential to accelerate learning and enhance outcomes for all learners. However, even when educational products have evidence of effectiveness, they do not often achieve scale. In other words, they are often not broadly adopted by schools and districts.
The Leveraging Evidence to Accelerate Recovery Nationwide (LEARN) network, a new three-year grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and led by SRI International, constitutes one element of the federal strategy to address both long-standing student learning achievement gaps and those exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
To support more successful transitions of educational research to the field, SRI researchers modified its Invent-Apply-Transition (I-A-T) framework, that has been successfully used to scale research to practice in healthcare, enterprise software, and robotics, to educational contexts based on the experiences of an Advisory Council and Expert Panel Members, all with direct experience successfully scaling educational innovations.