In August 2010, the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) received a grant of more than $25 million from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation (i3) program for a five-year study to validate its Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER) model in three very diverse regions of the United States: rural North Carolina, northern New Mexico, and the Houston Independent School District (HISD). This current report focuses on the confirmatory and exploratory research questions submitted to i3 for the two studies conducted for the LASER i3 validation grant, providing clarifying detail related to methodology and instrumentation. The studies were conducted to answer two confirmatory research questions and two exploratory research questions.