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…

School and district personnel have identified common challenges in implementing individualized, intensive interventions for students with severe, persistent learning and behavioral needs. The National Center on Intensive Intervention has worked with scores of local educators--including district administrators, building principals, special and…

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…

Describes "Start Making a Reader Today" (SMART), a volunteer tutoring program that helps K-2 students at risk of reading difficulties. Finds that the program improved students' word reading, reading fluency, and word comprehension, though level of performance at end of second grade was still much lower than that of average-achieving…

Many contemporary inservice programs set out initially to change teachers' attitudes or gain some sense of commitment from teachers prior to the implementation of a new program. However, some research studies suggest that such efforts, in and of themselves, are unlikely to bring about any real change. Serious commitment is likely to occur only…

This report describes TORUS, a computer-based program for elementary school students with learning disabilities which analyzes student work samples in addition and subtraction and provides individual profiles of student misconceptions and weaknesses. Initially, work samples from 236 middle school students with learning disabilities were analyzed…