Educational innovation is nowadays an indispensable concept when describing and understanding educational systems. It has been a key line of action in the reform processes globally implemented to adapt educational systems to the needs and societies of the 21st century (Caldwell & Spinks, 2013; Hallgarten & Beresford, 2015; Leadbeater & Wong, 2010). It has gained such centrality in the school environment that the OECD has announced what it calls "the imperative of innovation" (2015, p. 16). However, the widespread adoption of educational innovation in discursive and practical levels has not been accompanied by research and analysis efforts, leading to a lack of scientific knowledge regarding its conceptualization.

The term "educational innovation," despite its broad use by individuals from various fields, remains undefined. The word “innovation” is associated with the introduction of something new, implying a novel idea or element for an individual or group, from which a change in a system is derived. In the educational field, such change is associated with an idea of improvement in student learning and the quality of education (Rodríguez & Zubillaga, 2020). It can take the form of a theory, an organizational structure at the school or educational system level, a teaching-learning process, content, methodology, or teaching resource.

However, the term's meaning has not been precisely outlined, resulting in an ongoing lack of consensus and even contradictory meanings (Hill et al., 2022). This ambiguity makes it difficult to focus the debate and distinguish the purposes to which innovation responds. Consequently, although innovation has been established as imperative in current educational discourses, its meaning has remained vague and diffuse, hindering the assessment of its alignment with the quality and equity objectives that shape the global educational agenda for educational systems.

This communication aims to clarify this concept and address the limitation of current discourses and studies. To achieve this, it is necessary to delve into the origins of the term and observe its evolution. In the mid-20th century, there was a sharp interest in educational innovation understood as an improvement in students' academic performance, neglecting a more holistic vision of educational innovation related to human growth. This more integrated conceptualization progressively fades from the mid-20th century onwards in favor of school effectiveness, measuring its effects through educational performance and school profitability (Cogan, 1976). While it is a gradual process, it is primarily from the 1970s onwards when the concept of 'educational innovation' focuses predominantly on factors enabling the improvement of students' learning outcomes. For this reason, we concentrate the study on the meanings attributed to the concept of innovation in scientific research in the educational field between the 1970s and the 1990s.

The methodology employed has been a scoping review (Arksey and O’Malley, 2005). It involves a comprehensive and meticulously structured analysis of the scientific literature available on educational innovation. The search for key references was conducted in several phases. Firstly, a scoping review was conducted in JCR and Scopus as they are the main research databases with impact metrics. The JCR was searched using the term 'innovación educativa' in Spanish and 'educational innovation' in English. In Spanish, 0 results were obtained, and in English, 258 results were found. In Scopus, 0 results were found in Spanish, and 287 were found in English. This search had a disadvantage for the specific search period (1970-1990), as many important journals were not indexed during that time and, therefore, did not appear in the results. For this reason, the search was extended to include Google Scholar and JSTOR. Google Scholar returned 2990 articles in Spanish and 16,400 in English, making it challenging to screen. Therefore, the research team decided to exclude Google Scholar due to the abundance of documents that did not meet minimum scientific quality. This was the reason for choosing JSTOR, whose precision in the type of documents and sources was reliable for the search. In JSTOR, 46 documents were found in Spanish and 2,557 in English. By applying filters for "academic articles" and 'education' as the field of knowledge, the results were narrowed down to 1716 documents. The manual screening was then conducted based on the following criteria: non-university educational scope, non-specific didactic experiences, not focused on a specific discipline, and having a conceptual nature. The result after this screening was 54 documents: 10 in Spanish, 2 in French, and 42 in English. For the content analysis of the 54 selected documents, a table was created with columns for the year, title, authors, journal, key idea of the article – synthesis, innovation concept, models, trends, schools, related words (nomological network), areas of application of the concept (school organization, methodology, teacher training...), comments, and other references worth noting from this article.

From the mid-20th century, but especially from the 1970s onwards, there is a surge in educational innovation linked to factors that enable the improvement of students' learning outcomes (McGeown, 1979), as well as the effectiveness of teaching by educators and school leadership (Kozuch, 1979). However, some authors resist this trend, emphasizing the school's role as a space for cultural transmission (Eisner, 1990), the importance of the teacher's voice (Helsel, 1972), the need to consider contexts rather than isolated elements of the educational system (González Faraco, 1996), advocating for the ethical rather than technical nature of education (Jacob, 1997). The result is consistent with the initial hypothesis we held regarding the confusion and vagueness of the concept and the clarification that delving into history provides. The conceptual transformations of 'educational innovation' from the 1970s onward represent a concrete manifestation of the school effectiveness movements that emerged in response to the Coleman Report in the mid-1960s. This understanding of innovation focused on teaching effectiveness contrasts with a conceptualization of innovation as human growth and development that predates these years. In this sense, this communication provides a nomological network of the term 'educational innovation' and its related terms (renewal, change, improvement, progress), contributing to the current context of the imperative for innovation by offering clarification and systematization of the concept.

Arksey, H. & O'Malley, L. (2005). Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. International journal of social research methodology, 8(1), 19-32. https://doi.org/10.1080/1364557032000119616 Caldwell, B. J. & Spinks, J. M. (2013). The self-transforming school. Routledge. Cogan, M. L. (1976). Educational Innovation: Educational Wasteland. Theory Into Practice, 15(3), 220–227. Eisner, E. W. (1990). Who Decides What Schools Teach? The Phi Delta Kappan, 71(7), 523–526. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20404201 González Faraco, J. C. (1999). El currículum atrofiado: del pensamiento innovador en la práctica docente. Estudio longitudinal de la educación ambiental en Andalucía. REP, nº 213. Hallgarten, H. V., & Beresford, T. (2015). Creative Public Leadership: How School System Leaders Can Create the Conditions for System-wide Innovation. WISE. Helsel, A. R. (1972). Teachers’ Acceptance of Innovation and Innovation Characteristics. The High School Journal, 56(2), 67–76. Hill, K. L., Desimone, L., Wolford, T., Reitano, A. & Porter, A. (2022). Inside school turnaround: what drives success? Journal of Educational Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-022-09450-w Jacob, E. (1997). Context and Cognition: Implications for Educational Innovators and Anthropologists. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 28(1), 3–21. Kozuch, J. A. (1979). Implementing an Educational Innovation: The Constraints of the School Setting. The High School Journal, 62(5), 223–231. Leadbeater, C. & Wong, A. (2010). Learning from the Extremes. Cisco. McGeown, V. (1979). School Innovativeness as Process and Product. British Educational Research Journal, 5(2), 221–235. OCDE. (2015). Schooling Redesigned: Towards Innovative Learning Systems, Educational Research and Innovation. OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264245914-en Rodríguez, H. & Zubillaga, A. (Coords.) (2020). Reflexiones para el cambio: ¿Qué es innovar en educación? ANELE.