How Educational Innovators Apply Diffusion and Scale-Up Concepts

The challenge of how to diffuse and scale up effective educational interventions has received increasing attention from researchers in recent years, though achievement of this objective has confounded policy makers, practitioners, and the scholarly community at least since the 1970s. This chapter presents three case studies of efforts at US community college STEM centers to apply diffusion and scale-up concepts to their educational innovations to advance student learning. Ours is an analysis of knowledge use. These community college innovators participated in a series of meetings and activities over 3 years to familiarize themselves with concepts and strategies about diffusion and scale-up and were encouraged to apply these concepts in practice. Case study results show that teams of innovators did try to use these concepts, some more than others, and worked to resolve the combined use of concepts to best suit their own objectives. Innovators found some concepts to be overlapping or redundant, some too complex to apply, and some in contradiction. We conclude that teams acted in creative ways to implement diffusion and scale-up concepts. Recommendations for future efforts to spread educational interventions are made.