Each of the five articles in this special issue gets "into the weeds" in terms of studying actual classroom or school implementation of evidence-based or promising practices. Virtually all confront the issue of logistics and establishing an infrastructure for ensuring adequate implementation. In general, those studies that ask teachers…

When attempting to determine if an intervention has a causal impact, the "gold standard" of program evaluation is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). In education studies random assignment is rarely feasible at the student level, making RCTs harder to conduct. School-level assignment is more common but this often requires considerable resources…

A solid, emerging research base exists on how to provide meaningful access to the general education curriculum for students with learning disabilities. This article uses examples from research in comprehension and writing to highlight the underlying features of these empirically based approaches. The importance of multiple teaching strategies is…

A multivocal synthesis involving 13 educators and researchers investigated effective instruction for English-language learners and found five specific instructional variables, including: building and using vocabulary as a curricula anchor, using visuals to reinforce concepts, implementing cooperative learning and peer-tutoring strategies, using…

As a first step in developing a research program that united several individual strands of comprehension research, this paper describes studies that relate to the effectiveness of direct instruction. Various sections of the paper discuss the following topics: (1) variables in the direct instruction model, (2) teacher performance variables, (3)…