Making Sense of Educational Change: A longitudinal mixed-methods exploration of how students and teachers come to understand and enact school reform in Brazil
Educationalists across the globe face ever-increasing pressure to reform and improve schooling. But they regularly struggle to implement and sustain these changes in real-world practice. This is not particularly surprising: educational change, like all human change endeavors, is neither linear nor wholly predictable. It is a complex and dynamic process, involving the creative cognition of individual agents across diverse classroom communities. However, longitudinal and multi-actor accounts of such shifting cognition and action remain elusive in reform contexts. This thesis aims to unravel the *individual-level cognitive processes* that shape how educational change proceeds on the ground. Specifically, I follow the implementation of a large-scale reform known as *Programa Ensino Integral* (PEI) across upper-primary schools in São Paulo, Brazil. Adopting a *cognitive sensemaking perspective*, I conceptualize change as a process of creative interpretation and enactment; here, individuals deploy unique constellations of beliefs and understandings to decide how to act in the face of reform. My research therefore endeavors to uncover insights into the reform sensemaking process by tracing changes in *three core constructs*—schooling *beliefs*, reform *understandings*, and pedagogical *behaviors*—for *individual students* and *teachers*. I adopt a *longitudinal mixed-methods* approach to this change analysis. Quantitative data include 2,907 responses to a novel survey, administered at the beginning (February) and end (November) of the 2022 academic year across five upper-primary schools. Meanwhile, qualitative data emerge from three rounds of interviews and observations with a focal cohort of 24 students and 18 teachers in three of these schools. To trace changes in core constructs quantitatively, I conduct exploratory factor analysis, non-parametric paired hypothesis testing, and linear mixed-effects modeling. For qualitative data, I proceed with abductive and iterative thematic analysis. Integrated analyses ultimately converge to paint a picture of *sticky schooling beliefs*, *malleable reform understandings*, and *transient behavioral shifts* in multiple directions. I synthesize these findings into a set of *four cognitive mechanisms*—infrastructural, conceptual, affective, and agentic—which may affect individual trajectories during educational change. Practically, these suggest several insights for educationalists designing, implementing, and investigating reforms: first, they might consider how *physical and organizational structures* influence—and possibly impede—reform sensemaking; next, they could *facilitate ongoing dialog and reflection* to participatorily shape reform understandings and enactment; finally, they should account for the *agentic power of students*, *alongside teachers*, in driving reform. Guided by these mechanisms and insights, educationalists can build and re-build transformative schooling experiences that can help all learners thrive.
beliefs, change science, education policy, education reform, educational change, enactment, implementation science, school improvement, sensemaking, student agency, student beliefs, systems change, teacher beliefs
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