Applying Implementation Science in Early Childhood Programs and Systems

Book excerpt: Improving outcomes for young children and their families may start with choosing evidence-based curricula, interventions, and practices, but it doesn't end there. To ensure sustained changes to early childhood programs and systems, interventions must be implemented effectively and consistently over time, which isn't an easy or straightforward task. This important book is the first research volume on applying implementation science, an evidence-based framework for bridging the research-to-practice gap, to early childhood programs and systems. With contributions from 25+ early childhood researchers, this essential reference will help ensure that interventions are not only implemented effectively, but also scaled up and sustained so they help as many children as possible. Administrators, researchers, and policymakers will: discover the core components needed to implement and sustain change in programs and systems; explore through specific examples how to build practitioner competency and promote high-fidelity implementation of early childhood innovations; learn from a helpful five-step model for assessing the fidelity of interventions; understand how to create readiness for change and why it's so important; and see how implementation science can inform the process of systems change for early childhood professsional development systems and Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. More than a how-to-guide to effective implementation and scale-up this volume also addresses the theoretical foundation of the stages of implementation science at all levels of early childhood systems and considers research, practice, and policy implications. A foundational volume on the fundamentals of implementation science, this book will help improve long-term outcomes for all young children. Early childhood programs will learn how to replicate and sustain best practices, researchers will be ready to conduct more informed program evaluations, and policymakers will discover what it really takes to have effective, sustainable programs and systems.