This study served as a pilot evaluation of the efficacy of the 1-2-3 Magic Program (Phelan, 2003) as a brief parenting intervention for families with a school-aged child. Nine Australian families assigned to either a wait-listed control group (n = 4) or to one that received immediate intervention (n = 5), participated in a randomized controlled…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely considered to be the gold standard in evaluating the impacts of a social program. When an RCT is infeasible, researchers often estimate program impacts by comparing outcomes of program participants with those of a nonexperimental comparison group, adjusting for observable differences between the two…

The concept of "implementation fidelity" is broadly used to capture the extent to which an intervention is executed as intended by the designers of the intervention (Century, Rudnick, & Freeman, 2010; Huntley, 2005, McNaught, Tarr, & Sears, 2010, Munter, 2010). Though implementation fidelity instruments are often used to assess…

Emotional and behavioral outcomes of the Respecting Diversity (RD) program, a social and emotional learning (SEL) intervention to develop self-awareness, self-respect and respect for diverse others, were investigated with 218 students in Grades four to seven and their teachers. Intervention and control groups were assessed pre and post…

This report describes the findings of an analysis of a series of action research projects conducted by Goshen Community Schools at the middle school level. During the 2008-2009 school year, six teachers at Goshen Middle School participated in independent action research studies regarding the extent to which a six step approach to direct vocabulary…