This article addresses the gap between what works in research and what works in practice. Currently, research in evidence-based education policy and practice focuses on randomized controlled trials. These can support causal ascriptions ("It worked") but provide little basis for local effectiveness predictions ("It will work…

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.

The science-to-service problem continues to taunt the field of education (Fixsen, Blasé, Naoom, & Wallace, 2009). As an academic discipline, the field requires knowledge generation that adds to or deepens theoretical understandings. As a profession, knowledge generation that solves local problems and supports continuous improvement is…

The success of an intervention depends not only upon its theoretical soundness, but also on proper implementation that reflects the guidelines derived from its theoretical conception. Debates surrounding the effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) have focused on its theoretical conception and students' learning outcomes, but implementation…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) provides online reports to the public about the scientific evidence for educational interventions. The quality of these reports is important because they effectively tell the non-scientific community which programmes do and do not work. The aim of this brief review is to assess WWC's report on a clinically…

Of the four guides to schoolwide reform models (by Herman and others, Northwest Regional Education Laboratory, Robert Slavin, and Margaret Wang and associates), Herman's volume provides the most detailed, scholarly review. Practical information abounds, but more well-controlled and designed longitudinal studies are essential. (Contains 32…

This article examines the social skills training research-to-practice process and argues that a logical and attendant line of rigorous study is lacking. Areas of social inquiry are drawn from to discuss the need for conceptual frameworks to guide investigation and offer a way for research to be designed and interpreted. (Contains references.)…

The authors trace the development of the King's Formative Assessment Programme from its origins in diagnostic testing in the 1970s, through the graded assessment movement in the 1980s, to the present day. In doing so, they discuss the practical issues involved in reviewing research and outline the strategies that were used to try to communicate…

Research studies fail to support bilingual education theory, despite Hispanic parents' extensive lobbying to have their children taught in Spanish. Many Hispanic parents now realize that bilingual education has not served their best interests. The vast majority of limited-English-proficiency students receive English-as-a-Second Language…

This publication presents four major research papers on college campus substance abuse prevention and research with reviews of the papers by practitioners in the substance abuse prevention field. Following a Preface and Introduction, the first paper is "Theories, Dominant Models, and the Need for Applied Research" by Gerardo M. Gonzalez.…