The current science education reform movement emphasizes the importance of professional development as a means of improving student science achievement. Reformers have developed a vision for professional development based upon intensive and sustained training around concrete tasks that is focused on subject‐matter knowledge, connected to specific standards for student performance, and embedded in a systemic context. Using data from a National Science Foundation Teacher Enhancement program called the Local Systemic Change initiative, this study employs hierarchical linear modeling to examine the relationship between professional development and the reformers' vision of teaching practice. The findings indicate that the quantity of professional development in which teachers participate is strongly linked with both inquiry‐based teaching practice and investigative classroom culture. At the individual level, teachers' content preparation also has a powerful influence on teaching practice and classroom culture. At the school level, school socioeconomic status was found to influence practice more substantially than either principal supportiveness or available resources. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 963–980, 2000

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Conclusions drawn from the extant research suggest that data to support the efficacy of behavioral intervention in children exists for a limited number of intervention strategies, based on a meager number of methodologically acceptable studies.

Place-randomized trials have been mounted in a variety of countries to estimate the relative effects of interventions that are intended to ameliorate problems or improve conditions in organizations and geopolitical jurisdictions. This article presents studies in which villages, police hot spots, housing developments, hospital units, schools, and other entities are the units of random allocation. The challenges to such work, approaches to meeting them, and the value added of such trials are outlined. The scientific value added includes better evidence on what works at the macro level. Web-oriented registers of such trials are being developed by the Campbell Collaboration.

Young, low‐income, African American fathers have been at the center of research, practice, and policy on families over the past decade. This article uses a “voicing” analytic technique to examine identities among young, low‐income, African American fathers living in an urban setting; the intersections of these identities; and the fathers' perceptions of the influences of familial, peer, and legal systems as barriers and resources in their development as fathers and the sustainability of their fathering roles. The primary questions addressed urban fathers' representations of their transition to fatherhood, intergenerational relationships, transformative events, and visions of a possible self. Results from a survey, focus groups, and interviews suggest that the fathers seek to reinvent themselves and reconstruct their identities by separating from street life, redefine home as a place of stability, and challenge the practices of social and legal systems that appear to work against their responsible fathering.