Though there is widespread recognition of the importance of implementation research, evaluators often face intense logistical, budgetary, and methodological challenges in their efforts to assess intervention implementation in the field. This article proposes a set of natural language processing techniques called semantic similarity as an…

Five years into the Common Core initiative, researchers and the general public are interested to know whether and how the standards are "working." In this introduction to the special topic, I discuss the state of the literature on these questions and offer suggestions for what I view as the most important work moving forward.

Recent attention on partnerships between researchers and practitioners highlights the potential of these relationships to provide high-quality usable knowledge for improving schools. But how do we translate guiding partnership principles into specific actionable steps? How do we build and maintain an effective partnership? How do we reconcile and…