The Evaluation of Dissemination Efforts
Up until now, the general lack of attention that has been paid to dissemination has been cause for regret, but has not been of consequence. That position is not consistent with the increasing calls for accountability and heightened reporting expectations that stem from the No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB requires that K-12 education initiatives specify which learners are being reached and with what consequences, issues that can be addressed through well-designed dissemination activities.
Most publicly funded education projects are required to include some kind of dissemination component – where information about new practices, surprising outcomes, or interesting products is shared through a deliberate set of communication activities. When educators are in the proposal stage, they necessarily recognize the importance of dissemination. When submitting a proposal, project administrators usually list the kinds of dissemination activities that will take place at the end of the project or, less frequently, over the course of the initiative, and provide a budget, time, and other resources to support such information sharing. However, when a project gets underway, though, the hum of activities means that project administrators rarely have time to think about dissemination.
For the majority of projects, dissemination assumes predictable forms --
conference presentations, brochures, web pages, perhaps an article in a
professional journal. It is uncommon for education administrators to consider
how dissemination can further their project goals, and rarer still for them
to examine the effectiveness of their dissemination activities.
Project administrators struggling with questions of how to reach different
audiences in the most effective manner can benefit greatly from findings
stemming from research on dissemination. Dissemination has its roots in
studies of diffusion, an area of communications research that is best known
for studies of the diffusion of innovation. The elements composing dissemination
are straightforward -- dissemination involves (a) the communication (b)
of a new idea or product (c) over a period of time (d) through a particular
social system. Communication channels, the type of innovation, the spread
of an idea, and the identity of the intended recipients all affect the impact
of dissemination activities.
There are two main ways that dissemination activities can support decision making in education initiatives. First, through careful planning, dissemination efforts can be structured to form the basis of an ongoing dialog between the originator of an innovation and the intended audiences. This feedback can provide critical information to project administrators during the formative stages of an initiative. If you think about it, most education projects encourage teachers and schools to adopt innovations in the form of new processes, approaches, and technologies. To reach teachers and students, education initiatives must navigate through schools and school districts that differ in size and complexity. Dissemination research has pointed to particular characteristics of organizations that contribute to or frustrate the adoption of new approaches and technologies.
A second way that dissemination can support project administrators is through a careful consideration of the outcomes associated with information sharing activities. For example, many large-scale projects have been frustrated when schools choose to implement just a portion of, say, an innovative approach to instruction. The discrepancies in implementation mean that comparisons across sites are difficult to conduct. In the eyes of dissemination experts, however, this medley of partial implementation should be perceived as the rule, not the exception. The adoption and implementation of innovative approaches to education is not a "yes/no" situation.
It makes sense that organizations like schools and school districts will actually prefer to reinvent an innovation by adapting it to local needs. Through a careful study of the dissemination of the innovation, education leaders will be able to identify which components are considered relevant, which are ignored, and link these to the particular characteristics of the host institution or organization. By using a dissemination perspective to describe the range of adoption practices and host settings, education leaders will be better able to develop a more responsive (and realistic) approach.
Hezel Associates includes dissemination as part of its planning and evaluation services.