Measuring Enactment of Innovations and the Factors that Affect Implementation and Sustainability: Moving Toward Common Language and Shared Conceptual Understanding

This article describes research that focuses on the concern that researchers are unable to fully realize the potential value
of their collective efforts because they do not have shared conceptual or operational tools for communicating assumptions,
ideas, research strategies, or findings with others outside, or even within their disciplines. This research, through the
lens of measuring implementation of educational programs, has taken steps toward bringing researchers’ varied pictures of
understanding into a coherent landscape. This article describes a conceptual framework for describing aspects of implementation,
a conceptual framework for describing the factors that affect implementation, and tools for measuring each. It describes the
challenges addressed in the development of these approaches, and the application of these approaches to current studies in
education and other fields in the social sciences. In doing so, it demonstrates that meaningful communication between researchers
and accumulation of knowledge across fields is possible, and necessary.