Randomized experiments are a strong design for establishing impact evidence because the random assignment mechanism theoretically allows confidence in attributing group differences to the intervention. Growth of randomized experiments within educational studies has been widely documented. However, randomized experiments within education have…

The world of research has much knowledge to benefit practitioners, but it can be hard for practitioners to know where and how to sift through the research base to find the most relevant information for their needs. By translating problems of practice into the narrower types of questions that research can answer, educators can locate relevant…

Background: The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) is an independent charity that was established in 2011 with the explicit aim of breaking the link between family income and educational achievement in England. Over the seven years since its inception, EEF has contributed to the existing evidence base by funding over one hundred randomised…

The appropriate implementation of innovation is a crucial factor in improving educational practice. In the implementation process, there is, however, often a lack of interaction between designers and practitioners that would enable the latter to become competent enough to implement theoretical knowledge into practice and to have an ongoing support…

This chapter will examine characteristics of first-year experience programs in community colleges, with specific attention to the extant research about their effectiveness, the ways in which research and program delivery can be integrated, and the unique challenges of delivering FYE programs and conducting research about them in community colleges.

Treatment integrity (also referred to as "treatment fidelity," "intervention integrity," and "procedural reliability") is an important methodological concerning both research and practice because treatment integrity data are essential to making valid conclusions regarding treatment outcomes. Despite its relationship to validity, treatment…

This special series focused on treatment integrity in the child mental health and education field is timely. The articles do a laudable job of reviewing (a) the current status of treatment integrity research and measurement, (b) existing conceptual models of treatment integrity, and (c) the limitations of prior research. Overall, this thoughtful…

Researchers have only recently recognized that assertions by various educators that they have implemented educational innovations do not all mean the same thing or bear the same weight, according to the authors of this report. Efforts made by the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin to…

An approach to research that was conceptualized with the idea of replicating one study in dozens of locations simultaneously is described, focusing on two research projects with simultaneous replication. In 1988 researchers in 85 locations collected data in 276 schools as part of the Phi Delta Kappa Study of Schools At Risk. In 1982, data were…

Documenting treatment integrity is an important issue in research and practice in any discipline concerned with prevention and intervention. However, consensus concerning the dimensions of treatment integrity and how they should be measured has yet to emerge. Advances from three areas in which significant treatment integrity work has taken…

The concept of treatment integrity cuts across a diversity of fields involved with providing treatments or interventions to individuals. In medical treatments, the concept of "treatment compliance" or "treatment adherence" is an important and problematic issue. In the field of nutrition, the concept of "dietary adherence" is important for…

When different individuals operating in different contexts implement similar innovations, they approach the various parts of the innovation in different ways. When assessed according to the research procedures used to study innovation implementation at the Research and Development Center for Teacher Education at the University of Texas at Austin,…

Besides identifying current problems in educational change research, this document describes the inadequate paradigm on which past research has been based and outlines a currently emerging paradigm of educational innovation. The author asserts that previous research findings have been inconsistent and not comparable. Basic to the research problems…

School reform implementations most often proceed from an ahistorical position. A study analyzing articles in three volumes of each of two education journals ("Phi Delta Kappan" and "Educational Leadership") revealed that 17 to 48 percent had no references to support assertions; few references were older than 15 years. (Contains…

This report explores the field research experience of the Documentation and Technical Assistance Project, an activity of the Center for New Schools in Chicago, Illinois. Using ethnography as a major research tool, DTA studied nine school sites, documented information on how the schools solved problems to bring about school improvement; and…