Biancarosa, GinaJoye, Solaris2022-10-042022-10-042022-10-04https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27612School systems across the country, like those in Oregon, continually attempt to improve their students’ academic outcomes. Unfortunately, these costly efforts often fail to create lasting change. One factor in many of these failed improvement efforts is the lack of successfully implementing research-based practices (RBPs) at state and local levels. This phenomenon is often characterized as implementation failure. In the context of public K12 education, implementation failure often stems from a lack of knowledge about RBPs and a lack of capacity to implement them. While university-based school partnerships have long existed, these partnerships have more recently been formed to address this specific research to practice gap regarding the improvement of student outcomes.The Oregon Research Practice Partnership (ORPP) was established in 2017, with the goal of improving high school graduation rates across Oregon by helping to close this gap and help schools successfully implement RBPs to improve student outcomes. The purpose of this study was to assess initial implementation of ORPP to understand its early-phase processes to determine its level of fidelity with original goals and to gain insight into how future efforts can strengthen similar partnerships and bolster their outcomes in companion schools. This study includes a convergent mixed method design, examining school partner perceptions of the ORPP model. Results indicated that numerous implementation challenges existed early in the life of ORPP, which would require numerous adaptations for outputs to be more effective. Lessons are learned from these challenges that may help other similar partnerships in early phase implementation. Lessons include the need for early identification and adoption of an integrated implementation framework to guide initial partnership development. Framework adoption should include identification of implementation drivers, a process to ensure proper model fit for schools and their needs, and a clear mechanism to successfully transfer knowledge for sustained adoption by school partners. Defined training guidelines and role definition for all partners, which vertically align with district vision and goals, should be in place. Lastly, model fidelity measures need to be in place from the start.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Implementation OutcomesResearch-practice partnershipsSchool ImprovementUniversity school partnershipsElectronic Thesis or Dissertation