How has it been built?

SUMMA’s Educational Innovations Map has as a fundamental criterion to highlight innovations that show solid evidence in the achievement of their objectives and impact. In creating the map, we have identified leading institutions in highlighting and rewarding educational innovations. Institutions such as WISE, the Centre for Education Innovation (CEI), the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), Fundación Telefónica, the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI-OECD), the Global Education Innovation Initiative at Harvard University and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), have generously allowed us to integrate part of their work in order to nurture this new global map of educational innovations and thus enhance its reach in the region. All this information will be made available on the map in the first stage in Spanish and then soon in Portuguese and English.

What does the map contain?

The map allows us to visualize, in its first phase of development, a set of fifty existing educational innovations around the world. Each of them is classified according to different categories that help users to organize and search for them. There are four basic classification criteria:

1. Type of evidence:Identifies the type of evaluation to which the initiatives were subjected. Three groups of evaluations are distinguished: 1) impact evaluations that use experimental or quasi-experimental designs; 2) outcome evaluations without the presence of control groups; and 3) qualitative or process evaluations that lack quantitative information to measure the generated impact.

   Experimental or quasi-experimental evaluations correspond to an impact evaluation design that seeks to measure and quantify a causal effect of one or more variables on a desired situation. It is carried out by identifying two analysis groups (generally made up of teachers, students, or schools): a first intervention group, which is subjected to a specific programme or treatment, and a second control group, which is not subjected to the programme and has similar characteristics to the intervention group. The latter serves as a reference and comparison of the effect of the intervention. Outcome evaluations have been identified as those evaluations that do not have a control or comparison group to identify the specific effect of the programme or intervention.

2. Educational level: Classifies innovations according to the level of the school cycle in which they are implemented. They range from early childhood interventions to programmes that work in upper secondary school.Following the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) developed by UNESCO, we have defined that SUMMA’s Map of Educational Innovations will select innovation cases from ISCED levels 0, 1, 2 and 3, i.e., from early childhood education to upper secondary education.
3. Level of action:  it classifies innovation from the perspective of the type of priority actor with whom it seeks to work directly, i.e., it can be an intervention at school level where a new management model is developed, at the level of teacher training or where the direct group of action is the students.
4. Level of formality: it identifies innovations according to whether they are formal or non-formal, i.e., whether they are carried out in the educational centres themselves or whether they are carried out outside schools but following the curriculum established by the institutional framework in each country.UNESCO defines formal education as “institutionalized and intentional education, organized by public bodies and accredited private bodies, which together constitute the formal education system of the country”. On the other hand, non-formal education, ”like formal education (but as opposed to informal, unplanned, or random learning), is education that is institutionalized, intentional and organized by an education provider”. However, ”the defining characteristic of non-formal education is that it represents an alternative or complement to formal education for individuals within the lifelong learning process…non-formal education can be of short length and/or low intensity and is usually provided in the form of courses, seminars or workshops” (Unesco, 2013).