The SRI-led LEARN Network demonstrates how we can get the best evidence-based educational programs to classrooms and students.
For all the challenges faced by educators in the United States, there’s no shortage of educational products on the market.
The real problem, observes SRI principal education researcher and technical assistance provider Kerry Friedman, is that many of the most promising solutions never make it into the classroom.
That’s a concern even in the best of worlds. It’s a critical challenge now, as math and reading outcomes have yet to recover from their COVID-era decline.
One bright spot: It’s also a problem that the SRI-led LEARN Network — funded by the Department of Education’s Institute for Education Services — is uniquely suited to solve.
“We’ve found that there are all sorts of reasons that educators implement and sustain new programs and practices beyond just ‘Does it work?’” Friedman comments. “The LEARN Network was created to unpack why that’s the case and help figure out how we can more reliably get evidence-based products into the classroom.”
Why evidence-based educational products struggle to scale
Research shows that educational programs based on strong experimental evidence can translate into improved outcomes in the classroom. If that’s the case, why don’t all classrooms use the most rigorous, evidence-based approaches available?
“To illustrate the problem, I often go back to a story a colleague — a behavior researcher — told me,” Friedman offers. “They did this school-wide intervention, and they were seeing positive outcomes. Kids were doing really well. When the study was over, he asked some teachers how they were going to approach behavioral challenges moving forward. And the teachers essentially said: We’ll probably just go back to sending the kids to the principal’s office.”
“Educational product developers haven’t had access to strong data about how the procurement process differs across schools and districts. Without that data, it’s very difficult to develop an effective scaling strategy.” — Kerry Friedman
Stories like this, she finds, are quite common among educational product developers. “It’s not because teachers don’t want the best outcomes for students. It’s because the program is just too disruptive to the classroom flow, too resource-intensive, takes too much training or ongoing support, or, simply, people don’t like it,” Friedman observes.
Sometimes, promising programs never make it to the classroom in the first place. A small team of academics might provide free access to an exciting new product backed by rigorous experimental results, but because there’s no marketing budget or funding to re-invest in further development, it never finds its way into the hands of teachers.
Often, the sheer number of options is — paradoxically — an impediment to evidence-based products. School and district decision-makers are simply overwhelmed. As a result, they often adopt new products based on anecdotal peer recommendations rather than experimental evidence.
“And then there are those intangibles that, in the tech world, they call ‘delight,’” Friedman adds. “Does it make people feel good to use it?” Those intangibles can help an evidence-based product succeed. But they can also mask the deficiencies of engaging products that lack strong experimental foundations. Clever visual design and entertaining narrative elements, for example, may earn rave reviews from students without delivering best-in-class learning outcomes.
The LEARN Network difference
The key insight that defines the LEARN Network is that evidence-based products fail when they lack a clear scaling strategy.
In leading the LEARN Network, SRI was able to take the institute’s deep experience bringing ground-breaking discoveries from lab to market (think everything from Siri and robotic surgery to the computer mouse and the internet itself) and apply those same principles to the field of education.
Working with four product teams, SRI facilitated training, coaching, and collaboration activities grounded in SRI’s Invent-Apply-Transition (IAT) framework. These activities not only enhanced the teams’ scaling capacity, but also enabled SRI to further evaluate and refine scaling strategies for evidence-based educational products. These activities were then collected in a LEARN to Scale Toolkit that SRI has made freely available to all researchers and educational product developers, alongside an open access library of case studies, blogs, podcasts, webinars, and other resources.
At the same time, SRI pursued new research into current school and district procurement processes, bringing the commitment to rigor and relevance that guides the institute’s Education Division. “Educational product developers haven’t had access to strong data about how the procurement process differs across schools and districts,” explains Friedman. “Without that data, it’s very difficult to develop an effective scaling strategy.” The data dashboard that resulted from SRI’s research is now filling a significant gap, providing academic researchers and nonprofit labs with market data that they could never afford to acquire on their own.
Getting from research to learning outcomes
Among the many strategies and tactics surfaced by the LEARN Network, the most fundamental insight might be the simple fact that educational product developers need to think more carefully about scaling.
“Scaling shouldn’t come at the end,” Friedman emphasizes. “It has to be embedded through the whole research, design, and development process. That’s what we emphasize in the toolkit, and that’s the central insight from our work that will, I hope, continue to make an impact in the field of education.”
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The LEARN Network is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N220012 to SRI International. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
