This multiyear scale-up effectiveness study of Open Court Reading (OCR) involved approximately 4,500 students and more than 1,000 teachers per year in Grades K-5 from 49 elementary schools in seven districts across the country. Using a school-level cluster randomized trial design, we assessed the implementation and effectiveness of Open Court…

Purpose: The past decade has seen considerable debate about how to best evaluate the efficacy of educational improvement initiatives, and members of the educational leadership research community have entered the debate with great energy. Throughout this debate, the use of randomized experiments has been a particularly contentious subject. This…

Foster parents have special needs which must be addressed to retain them in the child welfare system. Several of these needs may be addressed within their foster parent training experience; however, little research is available to determine the effectiveness of these training programs. What little research is available is fraught with…

The GEAR UP graduation coach intervention developed by the GEAR UP Learning Centers at Western Michigan University (WMU) addresses the issue of academic failure of at-risk students in high school. This personalized early intervention strategy begins by assessing students' unique circumstances, academic histories, and strengths and weaknesses in…

We examined the immediate, short- and long-term effectiveness of the SNAP[TM] Under 12 Outreach Project (ORP)--a community-based program for children under the age of 12 at risk of having police contact. Sixteen pairs of children were matched on age, sex and severity of delinquency at admission, and randomly assigned to the ORP or to a control…

The National Job Corps Study has been conducted since 1993 to provide Congress and program managers with the information they need to assess how well Job Corps attains its goal of helping students become more responsible, employable, and productive citizens. The cornerstone of the study was the random assignment of all youths found eligible for…

The present study provided a randomized outcome evaluation of the psychoeducational component of the EQUIP program. The psychoeducational curriculum was implemented in a community correctional facility for adult felony offenders. The psychoeducational curriculum is designed to remedy offenders' delays in moral judgment maturity, social cognitive…