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Beginning with the "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001 (NCLB) and reinforced by the "Education Sciences Reform Act" of 2002 (ESRA), the federal government established explicit expectations for the role of research in informing decisions about education programs, policies, and practice, and it also specified new expectations for what constituted research knowledge that was worth using. Unfortunately, it is unknown whether these changes have actually led schools and individual educators to make better and more frequent use of research to inform their decisions. This paper documents early results from a nation-wide study of when and how educators use research in decisions about policy and practice. To motivate new approaches to increasing research use and evidence-based decision-making in schools, the authors are conducting a series of research studies, the first of which involves developing and validating a survey to measure depth of research use by schools and teachers through collection of multilevel data from district staff, school administrators, and classroom teachers. In this paper, the authors present results from the first pilot of this survey with over 500 educators from 32 schools. The results presented in this paper focus on the influence of scientifically-based research and IES-funded supports for research use (e.g., WWC, RELs) on school-wide and classroom-level decisions about practice. This paper serves to highlight the likely scope and severity of the apparent divide between educators' decisions and the effectiveness research intended inform those decisions. [SREE documents are structured abstracts of SREE conference symposium, panel, and paper or poster submissions.]

As part of the 2010 economic stimulus, a $55 million "Investing in Innovation" (i3) grant from the US Department of Education was awarded to scale up Reading Recovery across the nation. This paper presents the final round of results from the large-scale, mixed methods randomized evaluation of the implementation and impacts of Reading Recovery under this i3 Scale-Up. Over 10,000 low performing first-grade students from more than 1,000 schools participated in this study from 2010-2015. The evaluation design for the i3 scale-up of Reading Recovery includes a rigorous experimental research design (i.e., a multi-site randomized controlled trial) that supports strong causal inferences about program impacts, coupled with mixed methods descriptions of program implementation and contextual factors. Short-term impacts on students' reading performance are estimated by comparing mid-year reading achievement of students randomly assigned to participate in reading recovery at the beginning of first grade to students randomly assigned to the control condition. The consistently large positive impacts of Reading Recovery under the i3 scale-up suggest that this relatively large investment has led to substantial improvements in the reading performance of many thousands of students across the nation. In addition, results from the mixed-methods implementation evaluation revealed numerous programmatic and contextual factors that can support or hinder implementation of Reading Recovery by individual schools and may explain variation in impacts across sites.