27 Design Research and the Diffusion of Innovations

Dilemmas associated with moving effective curricular and pedagogical practices and programs into broader use among educators have persisted for years. Acknowledgment of these problems, referred to variously as issues of dissemination, knowledge use, scale up, technology transfer, or diffusion, have given rise over the years to organized efforts to reverse gaps between research evidence about effective education on the one hand and what is practiced on the other. For example, the National Science Foundation created Teacher Institutes and used commercial publishers to disseminate curricular innovations beginning in the late 1950s and on through the 1980s. The U.S. Department of Education instituted Project Innovation Packages, the Pilot State Dissemination Project, the Research and Development Utilization program, the National Diffusion Network (Raizen, 1979), and the Educational Resources Information Center Clearinghouse, all in the 1970s. Evaluations and reviews have found some of these efforts unsuccessful (Crandall, 1982; Horst et aI., 1975); others were determined to be successful, but expensive or nonsustaining (see Louis & Rosenblum, 1981; Sieber et aI., 1972; see also Hutchinson & Huberman [19931 for a review of this set of large-scale efforts at educational change). Most efforts to diffuse innovations are unsuccessful. If graphed in cumulative fashion over time, a nogrowth curve in adoption would be evident, as illustrated in Figure 27.1.