The Every Student Succeeds Act builds on prior efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice through the imposition of evidence requirements. This article presents findings from a small-scale micro-process study of three districts in one state during their first year of implementing those requirements. Informed by past conceptualizations of the research-practice gap and sociocultural theory, I look closely at how these practitioners made use of the state's highly elaborated implementation tools for research-based decision-making. I argue that these micro-processes point to possible new dimensions of the research-practice gap--namely, practitioners' understandings of the purposes of evidence, the degree of confidence evidence should provide, and the commensurability of different forms of evidence