Conceptualizing Preschools' Readiness to Implement Interventions

Introduction: Implementing interventions with fidelity can lead to significant improvements in children’s well-being. Unfortunately, fidelity of implementation often varies greatly, and understanding how to improve implementers’ likelihood of implementing is an ongoing area of study. What we do know, however, is that all implementers and implementing organizations have a history of experiences that make them more or less ready to implement a new intervention with fidelity. We also know that teachers are not always ready for implementation and in fact coaches in one recent study said that over one-third of preschool teachers were “not ready” to begin using a new intervention (Peterson, 2012). Existing measures of organizational readiness for change have been created for clinics, social service agencies, and hospitals (Helfrich, Li, Sharp, & Sales, 2009; Holt, Armenakis, Feild, & Harris, 2007; Lehman, Greener, & Simpson, 2002; Weiner, Belden, Bergmire, & Johnston, 2011), and have laid the groundwork for readiness measurement in preschools. In this poster presentation we will present a new measure of a preschools’ readiness to implement interventions, and the empirical literature used to inform the creation of the measure.

Methods:  We reviewed the extant literature on baseline predictors of fidelity of implementation. Studies came from the fields of organizational change, prevention science, early childhood interventions, and elementary school-based interventions. Based on Wandersman’s Prevention Delivery System model (2008), we categorized predictors into four system levels (community, director, preschool, and teacher) and divided each level into general readiness capacities (capacities that support implementation many types of interventions) and intervention-specific readiness capacities (capacities that are needed for specific types of interventions). These predictors served as the basis for the items in our readiness measure. We are in the process of conducting observations in preschools and consulting with early childhood experts to operationalize these items so an outside observer can rate them within a 2-hour visit to the preschool.   

Results:  Our measure consists of 37 items that tap a preschool’s general and domain-specific readiness to implement a new intervention. Items address all four system levels  and reflect a range of empirically-based predictors of implementation including constructs such as community networking, director leadership skills, innovation-orientated preschool climate, and teacher burn out. A researcher completes the measure by observing the shared spaces and classrooms in a preschool and conducting a brief interview with the preschool director.  

Conclusions: As interventions are increasingly used in preschool settings, a measure of a preschool’s readiness for implementation of a new intervention is needed. The goal of the proposed poster is to share our readiness measure in its early stages and get feedback from the prevention science community about how to refine it further. By further refining this measure, we aim to prepare for the next stage of research: psychometric testing.