To effectively address problems in education, research must be shaped around a problem of practice. Reorienting research and development in this way must overcome three obstacles. First, the incentive system for university researchers must be changed to reward research on problems of practice. Second, the contexts must be created that will allow the complexity of problems of practice to be understood and addressed by interdisciplinary teams of researchers, practitioners, and education designers. And third, meaningful experimentation must become acceptable in school systems in order to develop a better understanding of how to effectively stimulate and support the desired changes.

Superintendents from districts in the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) challenged the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) to identify an approach to narrowing the minority student achievement gap in Algebra 1 without isolating minority students for intervention. SERP partnered with 8 MSAN districts and researchers from 3 universities to design and rigorously test AlgebraByExample, a set of 42 Algebra 1 assignments with interleaved worked examples that target common misconceptions and errors. In a year-long random-assignment study, students who received AlgebraByExample assignments had an average 7 percentage point boost on a posttest containing released items from state assessments, and students in the bottom half of the performance distribution where minority students are disproportionately concentrated had an average 10 percentage point boost on a researcher-designed assessment of conceptual understanding. AlgebraByExample is easily incorporated into any existing curriculum, and naturally serves as a launch point for mathematically rich discussion.The Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) is a growing network of 29 suburban and small urban districts committed to eliminating the achievement gaps between their White and Asian students and their African American and Latino students (who range in number from 20% to 83% of the school population). The network was self-organized to accelerate learning in literacy and math and improve college-going rates by learning from each other and from Correspondence should be addressed to M. Suzanne Donovan,

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describe the principles behind the design of curricular units that offer disciplinary literacy support in the subject of history for middle school students who represent a wide range of reading levels, and for their teachers, whose own subject matter expertise in history varies. The authors elucidate the theory of change from which the design principles derive and reveal dilemmas they faced in enacting disciplinary literacy when adhering to these principles. They use transcripts from classrooms implementing the curriculum to show instances of students demonstrating key skills approximating those used by historians, despite some compromises with authentic historical scholarship in the curriculum itself. By offering high-interest materials, opportunities to connect history to student experiences, and active classroom discussions and debates over historical controversies, the Social Studies Generation (SoGen) history curriculum, a part of the multidisciplinary Word Generation program, is an attempt to reconcile the tension between maintaining high student engagement with history and inducting students into the complex work of real historians.

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