SustaIN - sustainable and meaningful interventions in educational context

External project members
Åsa Elwér, docent, Linköpings universitet
Sofia Frankenberg, docent, Stockholms universitet
Oddny Solheim, professor, Universitetet i Stavanger
Jenny Wilder, professor, Stockholms universitet
Hanna Ginner Hau, universitetslektor, Stockholms universitet

About the project

The project encompasses exploratory workshops aiming to explore new and innovative ideas. The idea behind the project is a response to the challenge of creating meaningful and sustainable interventions in preschool and school contexts.

The proposed workshops aim to address urgent questions within the evolving field of intervention research in a Swedish context. As intervention results accumulate, questions arise bout the sustainability of interventions and the contextual fit of the interventions in local educational settings. To address these questions, there is a need to
move away from linear models of change within intervention research and acknowledge the dynamic complexity of educational contexts.

We have put up a team of researchers, who have conducted intervention projects at a large scale, situated within both preschool and school contexts, and spanning over both academic and behavioral domains. Through a series of interconnected workshops, we plan to develop a framework for planning and conducting sustainable and meaningful interventions, which will be used in project and program applications.

In the first workshop, the designs and outcomes of previously conducted projects are analyzed using a theory of systems thinking. Based on the analyses, a framework for planning sustainable and meaningful interventions is developed, which is further developed and validated in a broader national context through a scoping review of Swedish intervention research and a symposium, summoning a variety of researchers within the intervention research field. The workshops intend to advance the field of intervention research and benefit educational research from both short-term and long-term perspectives.

Project objective

The aim is to address challenges in intervention research by analyzing Swedish intervention research and addressing questions of why, for whom, and under which conditions educational interventions were effective.