Abstract
The proliferation of school-based research around the world has grown in tandem with the policymakers’ emphasis on scaling successful empirical-based studies. More often than not, successful innovations are episodic in nature and fail to scale up over time due to a confluence of factors. This presents a problem as the embedded knowledge is confined to isolated and short-lived pockets of success that do not eventuate into impactful learning and teaching. This chapter reports the scaling trajectories of two exemplary flagship projects in NCPS – Seamless Science Learning and MyCLOUD. Both projects explored the use of mobile technologies to connect formal and informal learning spaces for Science and Chinese Language respectively. A longitudinal effort, both projects are in the midst of scaling up the intervention to different sets of sister schools. In this chapter, we aim to articulate the research trajectories of the two projects using the scaling up framework expounded by Dede and Coburn (2007). Explicating on how the projects are being scaled up within the school as well as what has been scaled up as a result of such sustainable intervention, we distilled the factors that underpinned the success of innovation diffusion. These include the cascading interplay of broad cultures and structure where local scaling activities can be made more congruent and the creation of multi-level sustainability for innovations to thrive in challenging environments. In the discussion section, we propose to expand Dede and Coburn’s framework to include ‘coherence’ as the sixth dimension to help practitioners rethink the synergistic fit of the scaled innovations with the broader socio-technological landscape of the school.
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Acknowledgements
The paper is a part of work from the project ‘Towards an Ecological Model of Scaling’ (NRF2013-EDU002-STUDY01) funded by the eduLab, which is jointly administered by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Ministry of Education (MOE) and National Institute of Education (NIE) to surface and spread ground-up pedagogic innovations enriched by interactive digital media. The authors would also like to thank the researchers involved in the two projects for their invaluable comments on the draft of the manuscript.
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Toh, Y., Lee, J.Y.L., Ting, K.S.W. (2016). Building Synergies: Taking School-Based Interventions to Scale. In: Chai, C., Lim, C., Tan, C. (eds) Future Learning in Primary Schools. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-579-2_12
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