Continuous improvement in schools: Understanding the practice

Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 2025

This study aimed to enhance the implementation of Continuous Improvement Projects (CIP) in a school district in Quezon by identifying the trails, barriers, and proposed solutions encountered during the CIP process, specifically in the phases of Assess, Analyze, and Act. Employing a qualitative approach, the researcher conducted face-to-face interviews with 14 focal persons using a validated interview guide. Thematic analysis was applied to identify common patterns in participants' experiences. Findings revealed several trails in the implementation of CIP. In the Assess phase, participants experienced uncertainty in planning meetings, difficulties in data collection and organization, and challenges in identifying problem areas. During the Analyze phase, they reported issues in conducting Root Cause Analysis (RCA), analyzing qualitative data, and selecting appropriate solutions. In the Act phase, team members focused on designing, testing, and implementing projects to address identified problems, while monitoring learner progress. Barriers included lack of CIP knowledge, teacher workload, time constraints, inadequate skills in questioning and data handling, unclear plans, inappropriate solutions, and team complacency. These issues were evident across all three phases of CIP implementation. As proposed solutions, participants suggested cross-school collaboration, action planning, task rotation, documentation of lessons learned, and incorporating interactive activities to improve engagement and outcomes. The study concludes that CIP team members encountered varied challenges but also developed practical strategies to overcome them. It recommends creating a compendium of these trails, barriers, and solutions to serve as a guide for improving future CIP implementation in schools.

2012

As part of its school improvement effort, AEL, a regional education laboratory, developed the Continuous School Improvement Questionnaire (AEL CSIQ). Staff from the AEL Quest schools program drafted a 65-item questionnaire to help measure and assess the efforts of the project team in their work with the 18 schools in the Quest network. These items embodied the six major concepts of the Quest school improvement program. After review and refinement, 42-item and 117-item versions of the scale were developed and combined for pilot testing. Pilot and field tests provided much information about the AEL CSIQ and its measurement. With data from more than 3,800 educators in 132 schools, the statistics generated have high stability and precision. The testing of the AEL CSIQ in the field fostered its development into an excellent and usable 6-item inventory. The CSIQ was reduced from 147 items with unequal numbers of items in subscales to 10 items in each subscale. The AEL CSIQ was found to be...

Independent Journal of Management & Production, 2013

The goal of this work was to examine the content of continuous improvement processes, taking into account its inclusion in modern organizations´ strategies. Continuous improvement plays an important role in ISO 9000 norms and excellence models. This paper argues that several specific issues must be taken into account in order to reach successful outcomes. This work starts with a literature review on the matter. On this basis we designed a survey of a group of 30 large companies, selected according to their billing, its market share, its membership to quality institutions and the existence of a certified management system. Finally, we compared the development of continuous improvement process in companies with very effective results and with scarce results. Differences that emerged from this comparison enabled us to identify critical factors for achieving a successful improvement process.

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2016

This article describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative process to bring to scale practices that have been shown to improve student achievement in high schools in Broward County, Florida, and Fort Worth, Texas. To do so, the Center's model of improvement relies on three core principles. First, a prototype is built to reflect the core elements of programs or practices that have been shown to be effective locally. Second, rapid-cycle testing is used to allow the prototype to be revised in ways that adapt it to a particular school context. Third, a researcher–practitioner partnership is employed that strives to both take advantage of and build local ownership and expertise. In so doing, the c...

2001

Not much research has been done on the factors that affect schools' willingness to undertake school-improvement efforts with the assistance of outside organizations. To address this lack, staff of the Quest project at AEL, Inc. conducted a multi-method exploratory study of issues considered significant to schools' engagement with reform. Focus group interviews of February 1999 Quest conference participants (N=41) were conducted, and phone interviews were made to teachers less engaged or not involved in the Quest network (N=26). Study participants were also asked to complete the Quest Engagement Survey form (N=58). Responses were numerically coded and analyzed statistically. Survey responses indicated that personal beliefs about education and change were most significant to both beginning and ongoing participation. Focus-group and individual interviews suggested that building-level administrative support for participation had been most important to both initial and sustained involvement. These and other findings suggest that organizations supporting school improvement ought to consider ongoing needs assessment as a means to target support and assistance that remains relevant to participating schools as reform continues.

Like any other higher learning institutions, PHEIs in Basilan, an island province of the Philippines in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), are also confronted with challenges when it comes to QA in tertiary education in terms of CQI. The study was conducted to assess the practices on continuous quality improvement among teacher education institutions in Basilan. The study employed a mixed methods design, all quantitative data were collected purposively from sixty (60) faculty members using an adapted questionnaire formulated by Thalner (2005) of Western Michigan University, the instrument consists of a framework that measures CQI in higher education, and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the weighted means, standard deviations, and ranges for the various variables. While the qualitative data were collected from ten (10) college deans, and program chairpersons and the vice president for academic affairs from the four HEIs, utilizing FGD and KII. Results showed that awareness on the continuous quality improvement is present but the need to strengthen the training on the process and methods should not only among department heads to strengthen the commitment as a shared culture in the pursuit of quality assurance, Commitment towards continuous quality improvement regardless of departments and among stakeholders is evident to be a powerful tool given the training and other resources available, and support mechanism for a continuous quality improvement must be guided by a framework best fit for academic institutions. Thus, this study came up with the following recommendations: maintain and enhance standards as well as review policies. Quality assurance is a way for institutions to maintain standards and continuously improve the standards of education, facilities, support, among others, commitment to provide excellent customer service which will be strengthened if there will be trainings and webinars and emphasize commitment towards con-How to cite this paper: Rodriguez, R. L.

2001

This paper describes summative evaluation of the Quest project at AEL, Inc. Quest is a network of schools committed to continuous improvement based upon principles of collaboration, inquiry, and action research. AEL, Inc., is a nonprofit corporation that works with educators in ongoing research and development efforts to improve education and educational opportunity. AEL serves as the Regional Educational Laboratory for the states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, 2019

Background Traditional methods of implementing educational innovations face a number of critical challenges that have problematized efforts to improve practice, particularly at scale. Recently, continuous improvement approaches have gained attention, offering structured, iterative processes for developing innovations that incorporate the wisdom of practitioners, are responsive to individual school contexts, and promote organizational learning over time. Purpose The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU) is one purveyor of such an approach, working to enact partnership-based continuous improvement processes in two large urban school districts in the U.S. This study presents a systematic, empirical investigation of the NCSU's work in order to offer recommendations for future efforts to study and implement such approaches in the complex environment of public schools. Research Design and Methods Drawing from an analysis of over 400 hours of recorded meetings, feedbac...

Production Planning & Control

The aim of this study is to identify key management decisions that enable the sustainment of a continuous improvement (CI) initiative. To accomplish this aim, we examine the procedures and practices used by two manufacturing companies for the management of their CI initiatives; one that is successfully sustaining the effectiveness of its CI initiative and another failing to do the same. This research makes two contributions to the conceptual understanding of CI programme management. First, we identify five CI programme management factors that enable the sustainment of a CI initiative. Second, the five factors are incorporated into a new CI programme management model. The model details a 'bottom-up' procedure for the generation of manufacturing performance improvement ideas and the management of their implementation.

2020

The purpose of the study is to determine the impact of the completed Continuous Improvement (CI) projects on schools' performance. Qualitative method was utilized to analyze the submitted CI and BEIS reports of the eight schools in the Division of Antipolo City that were able to complete their CI project successfully in three consecutive years. Thematic analysis was applied to determine how CI helped improve the schools and identify the challenges encountered in implementing it. Findings revealed that most of the schools are more focused on improving their Achievement rate than the other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The performances of the schools in terms of Dropout has improved after the CI implementation. On the other hand, the performances of the schools in terms of Repetition did not improve because there were no CI projects conducted focused on it. Finally, the impact on the performances of the schools after the implementation of continuous improvement projects in te...