Defining Sustainability, Scale-Up, and Diffusion in the Education Literature
This paper comes out of an NSF-funded project that focuses in part on accumulating knowledge about scaling and sustainability of innovations in education and other fields. Any research focused on summarizing or synthesizing knowledge must begin with the explication of definitions leading to a shared understanding of the concept under study. This paper shares findings from an initial document review and highlights the range of operational and conceptual definitions for "sustainability" that are used in the field. Through sound methodology and rigorous analysis, the paper will present the full range of the field's definitions of sustainability and demonstrate how we have used these definitions to construct a conceptual framework for shared understanding of sustainability of educational change.