Major Purposes of the Special Strategies Studies

This overview presents the major purposes of the Urban and Suburban/Rural Special Strategies Studies for Educating Disadvantaged Children, describes the studies methods, provides findings from the full three years of data gathering, and explores policy implications of the studies. The Special Strategies studies were developed to accomplish three goals:

1. Describe promising alternatives for Chapter 1 practices. This included collecting in-depth information about the day-to-day operation of a variety of innovative teaching and programming strategies.
2. Compare the characteristics of promising alternatives to more traditional practices. This included gathering various process and outcome measures across several program types and contrasting those results with the more quantitative data gathered in Prospects (Puma, Rock, & Fernandez, 1993).
3. Assess the replicability of programs that appear most successful. This included evaluating factors that might facilitate or impede implementation elsewhere.