This quantitative study examines relationships between student performance and student, teacher, teaching, teacher professional development, and school characteristics in the context of a large-scale, top-down, nationwide curriculum and examination reform across multiple science disciplines and different stages of the reform. Levers to improve student performance include teachers’ perceived administrative support, self-efficacy, teaching experience, elements of classroom instruction, and selected aspects of professional development participation.

This chapter discusses frameworks and conceptual lenses that help orient design-based implementation research (DBIR) work to the types of infrastructure required for success, while contributing to theories about the processes of educational improvement. Such infrastructures can be conceived as a framework: a set of interconnected elements that facilitate the integrated development of an initiative, provide a continuing narrative for this development, create shared responsibility for its implementation, and facilitate its sustainability. The chapter posits that several types of infrastructure are necessary for successful, sustainable DBIR, including conceptual frameworks that attend to issues of scale, human capacity, technical support, policies, organizational learning, and long-term funding. In addition, the chapter discusses the roles that feedback loops, intermediary organizations, and multiple timescales play in systemic educational improvement, and describes how attention to these different infrastructural needs can lead to sustained improvements and support their evolution over time. The chapter also comments on theoretical and practical advances in social policy that often are not integrated into learning sciences research but are crucial for evolutionary educational improvement, including using organizational learning as a measure of progress, attending to social feedback loops and networks inside and outside of schooling, and utilizing the tools of policy informatics.

This chapter attempts to answer the question: If we were to redesign education not to make historic models of schooling more efficient, but instead to prepare students for the 21st century—simultaneously transforming teaching in light of our current knowledge about the mind— what types of learning environments might sophisticated ICT enable us to create?

Along with many others, I believe that a new structure for formal education is needed for our nation's graduates to compete in the 21st century knowledge-based global economy. The one-room rural schoolhouse, emblematic of agricultural America, was replaced a century ago with the industrial-era schools we still have today. A comparable shift is necessary now; valiant attempts to keep the obsolete structure of today's schools (and colleges), but change people, policies, and practices are falling well short of delivering high quality educational outcomes for all our students. The U.S. Department of Education's draft 2010 National Educational Technology Plan provides a pathway towards developing a 21st century model of formal education to replace industrial-era schooling. Schools as custodial institutions are a starting point for considering the work of teaching, but a distributed model of human and technical infrastructure encompasses a wider context of formal learning outside of classrooms that includes parents, museum and library staff, community members, and older peers as educators who collaborate with teachers in achieving equity and excellence. The many affordances of modern technology can now support both a broader suite of roles involving "teaching" and a range of educational delivery systems beyond the walls of the school.