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Research on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change

Item

Title
Research on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change
Abstract/Description
As a result of the frustration with the dominant “What Works” paradigm of large-scale research-based improvement, practitioners, researchers, foundations, and policymakers are increasingly embracing a set of ideas and practices that can be collectively labeled continuous improvement (CI) methods. This chapter provides a comparative review of these methods, paying particular attention to CI methods’ intellectual influences, theories of action, and affordances and challenges in practice. We first map out and explore the shared intellectual forebears that CI methods draw on. We then discuss three kinds of complexity to which CI methods explicitly attend—ambiguity, variability, and interdependence—and how CI methods seek a balance of local and formal knowledge in response to this complexity. We go on to argue that CI methods are generally less attentive to the relational and political dimensions of educational change and that this leads to challenges in practice. We conclude by considering CI methods’ aspirations for impact at scale, and offer a number of recommendations to inform future research and practice.
Author/creator
Yurkofsky, Maxwell M.
Peterson, Amelia J.
Mehta, Jal D.
Horwitz-Willis, Rebecca
Frumin, Kim M.
Date
2020
In publication
Review of Research in Education
Volume
44
Issue
1
Pages
403-433
Resource type
en Research/Scholarly Media
Resource status/form
en Published Text
Scholarship genre
en Synthesis/Overview
Language
en
Open access/full-text available
en Yes
Peer reviewed
en Yes
ISSN
0091-732X
DOI
10.3102/0091732X20907363
URL
Free Access on Publisher's Webpage (SAGE Journals)
Citation
Yurkofsky, M. M., Peterson, A. J., Mehta, J. D., Horwitz-Willis, R., & Frumin, K. M. (2020). Research on Continuous Improvement: Exploring the Complexities of Managing Educational Change. Review of Research in Education, 44(1), 403–433. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X20907363
Cited in
The Work of Improvement
Abbreviation
Review of Research in Education
Item sets
Open Access Resource (IRE)
Handbook Chapter 11 Citations
Handbook Chapter 2 Citations

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