Despite the common title of "coach," definitions of high-quality coaching vary tremendously across models and programs. Yet few studies make comparisons between different models to understand what is most helpful, for whom, and under what circumstances. As a result, practitioners are left with many options and little evidence-based…

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is the nonpartisan research and analytical arm of the U.S. Congress and is physically and structurally located within the Library of Congress. Despite the role of CRS as a critical information provider and technical assistant to actors crafting and implementing federal policy, CRS reports, which serve as a…

Despite calls for evidence-based decision making, the field has a limited understanding of how educational leaders actually engage research. This study draws on a nationally representative sample of 368 district and school leaders who named pieces of research that were useful to their work. Educational leaders found frameworks and practical…

State policymakers wrestle with long-standing questions and concerns about how to best provide additional fiscal support to rural school districts to ensure their students have access to adequate educational opportunities. In this study, we describe how one state developed empirically based estimates for the additional cost of operating rural…

The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and Next Generation Science Standards encourage substantial shifts in teaching, but how to enact change is not specified. This mixed-methods exploratory study shows how different implementation supports were related to teachers' use of standards-aligned instructional practices in the Chicago Public…

Implementation of university-based animal-assisted stress-prevention programs is increasing despite limited knowledge about impacts on students' academic success. This randomized trial (N = 309) examined the effects of a 4-week stress-prevention program with varying levels of human-animal interaction (HAI) and evidence-based content presentations…

This study examined how school and district leaders access, value, and use research. From a representative sample of school districts across the United States, we surveyed 733 school and district leaders as part of an effort to develop understanding of the prevalence of research use, the nature of leaders' attitudes toward research, and individual…

Perhaps more than at any other time in history, the development of mathematical skill is critical for the long-term success of students. Unfortunately, on average, U.S. students lag behind their peers in other developed countries on mathematics outcomes, and within the United States, an entrenched mathematics achievement gap exists between…

Achieving high-quality preschool at scale is challenging; to do so likely entails a combination of program standards, teacher qualifications and compensation, on-site quality monitoring, and professional development (PD). This study aims to examine the impact of investments in PD within the context of an expansion of universal preschool in one of…

Almost every state-level Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) in the country includes family engagement as an indicator of early childhood education quality. Yet, most QRIS measure family engagement using a uniform, narrow set of parent involvement activities at the center. We propose an alternative approach that emphasizes a range of…

This study examined the effects of the Success for All (SFA) whole-school reform approach on student reading achievement. The data were collected for the Study of Instructional Improvement by the University of Michigan, which did not previously report the achievement outcomes in detail but did make the data available online. Using propensity…

The article examines the results of two quasi-experimental studies of the implementation and impact of the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC), an intervention designed to support secondary teachers' transition to Common Core State Standards in English language arts. The first study examines LDC implementation by eighth-grade social studies and…