Open Minds, Open Data, Open Futures

About the Project

Improving the scaling of research-based interventions, and thus the impact of those research dollars, is a national priority. However, little is known about overcoming the barriers to implementation. Indeed, implementation often falls to school leaders because packaging, scaling, and marketing interventions are challenges that are far beyond the skill set of most academic researchers (National Academies of Sciences et al., 2022).

Open Implementation brings together district and regional leaders, research teams, developers, and data scientists to improve the implementation of research-based programs. Our goals are to:

• Improve access to research-based programs, pooling resources to support implementation.
• Support implementation practices for schools and districts.
• Collect and share data for ongoing iterative improvements of research-based programs.
• Collect structured implementation data across programs to help districts and researchers compare results within and across programs and districts.
• Use open-source projects and share code at https://github.com/OpenImplementation.
• Share deidentified data at https://osf.io/8gmwe/.
• Introduce district leaders to research-based programs and understand how to implement them at https://discourse.openimplementation.io/.

Our Educational Leadership Council

Our thought leadership team includes district and school administrators, and instructional leaders in Riverside, OH; Canton, OH; Marysville, OH; Lakota, OH; Oberlin, OH; Park6, WY; and Marlborough, MA. Our council also includes regional leaders and state leaders, including Dr. Sarah Negrete (NV) and Rachel Daniels (OH). This collaboration underscores our commitment to leveraging local and national expertise in shaping the future of education through our platform.

Our Program Development and Research Team

We work closely with research teams who are using research to improve practice and provide equitable outcomes for students. These teams are critical thought leaders in understanding what good implementation means, how we support it, and what kind of data these research groups need to make ongoing iterative improvements to their programs. Our collaborators include:

• EL RAVE (English Learners’ Robust Academic Vocabulary Encounters), led by Dr. Amy Crosson (Penn State) and Margaret McKeown (Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh) is an academic vocabulary program designed for Emergent Bilingual learners in grades 6-8.
• Reading Ways, developed by Joshua Lawrence (University of Oslo), Jacy Ippolito (Salem State University), and Shannon Bosley (Reading Ways). Reading Ways has developed 6 courses to support middle and high school adoption of disciplinary literacy practices.
• CLAVES (Cultivating Linguistic Awareness for Voice and Equity in Schools) is a language-based literacy curriculum designed for upper elementary multilingual students. Research team includes Rebecca Silverman (Stanford), Patrick Proctor (Boston University), Michael Kieffer (NYU), Jeffrey Harring (University of Maryland), and Elise Cappella (NYU).
• Word Generation, developed by Catherine Snow (Harvard Graduate School of Education) and supported by SERP. It is a set of Tier 1, research-based curricular resources designed for use across content areas in grades 4–8, emphasizing academic language, argumentation, analytic reasoning, reading to find evidence, oral discussion, and writing.
• The TRANSLATE Project (Teaching Reading And New Strategic Language Approaches To Emergent bilinguals) helps students use cognitive, linguistic, and social strategies to facilitate translation and comprehension of that text by creating translated texts, comparing their translations, and summarizing their understanding. Research team includes Robert Jiménez (Vanderbilt), Emily Phillips Galloway (Vanderbilt), Amanda Goodwin (Vanderbilt), and Samuel David (University of Minnesota).
• Talk Wall, led by Ingvill Rasmussen (University of Oslo), offers a dynamic platform for educational engagement that allows teachers to demonstrate the importance of every student's ideas, not just those from the most vocal or perceived as the most knowledgeable.
• Better Equipped is a project led by Åste Marie Hagen (University of Oslo) that helps identify children who could potentially benefit from supplemental language support by developing a valid, well-designed tool to assess children’s language skills (in multiple languages) from an early age.
• ROAR (The Rapid Online Assessment of Reading), An open-access assessment platform grounded in ongoing research by the Stanford Reading & Dyslexia Research Program. The research team is led by Jason Yeatman (Stanford University). ROAR aims to facilitate the assessment of reading skills and dyslexia across diverse populations, utilizing cutting-edge research to support educators, clinicians, and researchers.

Technical Partners

• Engagelab, a specialized group at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo that assists researchers at the Faculty of Educational Sciences with design, ICT development, and testing. The group consists of programmers, designers, and researchers who are involved in multiple projects at any given time.
• The Digital Learning Lab (DLL), established by Mark Warschauer, employs innovative methods to enhance our comprehension of student learning across all levels, from early education to postgraduate studies. It is dedicated to creating and advancing new technologies and materials to enrich digital learning experiences.