A report on implementation of the Multicultural Reading and Thinking (McRAT) Program in Arkansas from 1989-92 chronicles the program's development, operation, and results. McRAT is a staff development program designed to help teachers infuse higher order thinking processes and multicultural concepts into regular classroom curricula (grades 3 to 8). The program provides teachers with explicit strategies for teaching reasoning and problem solving throughout the curriculum; it trains teachers in state-of-the art alternative assessment approaches to evaluating student progress, emphasizes intercultural concepts as a meaningful context for application of thinking and problem- solving strategies, and includes methods for integrating direct instruction with other effective strategies such as cooperative learning, process writing, and facilitated group discussion. Data on the program were from evaluation of student essays using scoring consistent with those of other large-scale writing assessments. Findings included the following: (1) McRAT students demonstrated evidence of higher order thinking through significantly higher gains on analytically scored essays than non-McRAT students; (2) participants demonstrated retention of learning over time; (3) McRAT students outperformed control students regardless of classification; (4) no statistically significant difference between performance of minority versus non-minority students; and (5) assessment procedures showed a high degree of inter-rater reliability. Ten tables provide detailed program evaluation results. (Contains 11 references.) (JB)