As a result of the frustration with the dominant “What Works” paradigm of large-scale research-based improvement, practitioners, researchers, foundations, and policymakers are increasingly embracing a set of ideas and practices that can be collectively labeled continuous improvement (CI) methods. This chapter provides a comparative review of these methods, paying particular attention to CI methods’ intellectual influences, theories of action, and affordances and challenges in practice. We first map out and explore the shared intellectual forebears that CI methods draw on. We then discuss three kinds of complexity to which CI methods explicitly attend—ambiguity, variability, and interdependence—and how CI methods seek a balance of local and formal knowledge in response to this complexity. We go on to argue that CI methods are generally less attentive to the relational and political dimensions of educational change and that this leads to challenges in practice. We conclude by considering CI methods’ aspirations for impact at scale, and offer a number of recommendations to inform future research and practice.

中文翻译：

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持续改进研究：探索管理教育变革的复杂性

由于对大规模基于研究的改进的主导“什么有效”范式感到沮丧，实践者、研究人员、基金会和政策制定者越来越多地接受一组可以统称为持续改进 (CI) 的想法和实践方法。本章对这些方法进行了比较回顾，特别关注 CI 方法的智力影响、行动理论以及实践中的启示和挑战。我们首先绘制并探索 CI 方法所借鉴的共享知识先驱。然后，我们讨论 CI 方法明确涉及的三种复杂性——模糊性、可变性和相互依赖性——以及 CI 方法如何寻求本地和正式知识的平衡以应对这种复杂性。我们继续争辩说，CI 方法通常不太关注教育变革的关系和政治层面，这会导致实践中的挑战。最后，我们考虑了 CI 方法对大规模影响的渴望，并提供了一些建议，为未来的研究和实践提供信息。