Designing for Sustained Adoption: The Increase the Impact Project

Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
Renee Cole, University of Iowa
Courtney Stanford, University of Iowa
Jeff Froyd, Texas A&M University
Raina Khatri, Texas A&M University
Debra Gilbuena, Oregon State University

Abstract

Every year many educational innovation development projects are funded to improve the quality of undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. While there is a large amount of research on effective undergraduate teaching and learning, there is concern that the instructional strategies and materials being developed (the products of the projects) are not being widely adopted. Currently, almost all educational innovations struggle to propagate because project teams tend to focus primarily on telling people about their product (dissemination); however, this is only one step of a process that leads to successful propagation of educational innovations.

The Increase the Impact project (www.increasetheimpact.com) has prepared a set of resources (How-To Guide, Designing for Sustained Adoption Assessment Instrument, Face-to-Face Workshop, and Online Workshop) to help principal investigators of educational innovation and development projects develop and improve a propagation plan.